Cravings (I): How and Why?

Two categories of food that people often crave are sweet, like chocolate, and salty, like potato chips (Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff).

Craving (tanha) in Buddhist terms literally means "thirst." Figuratively, it is the cause of suffering. Often it mean lust or less intense "desire" for the five strands of sense pleasures that come through the senses. It is synonymous with "greed" (lobha) and "lust" (raga).

Associated with ignorance and aversion, it motivates action (karma). With action comes result. Results give rise to repeated "rebecoming," renewal, rearising -- rebirth. With rebirth comes aging, sickness, and death. And with death comes rebirth. This endless cycle is called Samsara (literally, "the continued wandering on"). Vivid similes describe this concept of "the cycle of rebirth" as an ever-turning wheel we hurry along on, a massive flood we are trying to cross, a treacherous ocean upon which we bob helplessly, and as a terrible ogre gobbling up the world.

When one gets what one craves, one is not satisfied but only temporarily satiated. Things are unsatisfactory. They are soon lost; experience is transitory. They are not capable of being owned or giving their temporary possessor satisfaction; they are impersonal). When one does not get what one wants, one suffers frustration and longing. One may even crave non-existence and commit suicide to escape the pain of frustration. When one gets what one does not want, one suffers by association with the unwanted.

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When one neither wants nor gets, there is no problem, and even if one gets, there is no problem. But that means overcoming craving, ignorance, and aversion; then there's really no problem. This overcoming is called enlightenment (bodhi). With the end of craving -- which makes abandoning ignorance and aversion possible -- there is the end of all suffering. This is called nirvana.

But why do we crave in the first place? Buddhist Psychology explains it in a complex text called the Abhidharma (the "Higher teachings"). Western science, starting empirically, is also beginning to unravel the problem. Here's a new understanding of how and why we crave:

Cravings Part I of III
Why we have them and what they mean

Devra First (Boston Globe)

Cravings are universal, so much so that bakeries across the land name themselves after these feelings of unbidden food-lust. It's a shorthand we all understand: the desire -- no, the need -- for something gooey and sweet or salty and crunchy.

According to Marcia Pelchat, a sensory psychologist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia who studies food cravings, 90 to 100 percent of women aged 18-35 report having them, as do 67 percent of men in the same age bracket. But what actually happens to us when, out of nowhere, we are seized by a longing to bite into a piece of chocolate or get up close and personal with a bag of chips?

"The underlying causes of cravings are still pretty poorly understood," says Cheryl Gilhooly, senior research dietitian at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. The explanation appears to be a complex web of biology and emotion. One thing, however, is certain: "In our research, we've looked at characteristics of foods craved, and it has to do with calories. A combination of fat and carbohydrates is the defining characteristic."

The evolutionary advantages of craving high-calorie, energy-dense foods are clear, if no longer quite as beneficial in the age of obesity. "Physiologically, we're hardwired to want to eat fat because if our ancestors ate a lot of fat, they were more likely not to starve," says Brian Wansink, an expert in food psychology and consumer behavior and the author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. "Psychologically people often have cravings for food in response to a lack of equilibrium, whether they have the flu or things aren't going well at work. It's an effort to compensate for something missing."

Pelchat has conducted imaging studies of the brain during food cravings. Cravings, she says, activate the caudate nucleus, one of the parts of the brain involved in habit formation; it's also activated during drug cravings. A cocaine user who has physiologically kicked the habit might find himself craving cocaine in a situation he associates with the drug. Cravings work pretty much the same way for a doughnut user.

"If you go by a doughnut store on the way home, it can trigger a habitual response," Pelchat says. "If you've gone in before, just seeing it may cause you to cross the street and go in again. But it can also make you think of doughnuts, and another part of the brain involved in food cravings is the circuit that's involved in obsessing." That comes as no surprise to anyone who's experienced a food craving.

[End of Part I] Read more: