Cravings Decoded: Which Nutrients Do We Crave the Most? 

Ever wonder why you crave chocolate or chips? Your cravings aren’t random—they’re your body’s way of crying out for essential nutrients.

A deeper understanding of your cravings can empower you to make better food choices and crush cravings before they get out of control. 

Cravings aren’t just about indulgence—they’re signals from your body that it needs specific nutrients. By understanding these signals and choosing nutrient-dense foods, you can satisfy cravings while avoiding excess calories.

This article dissects the data to decipher your cravings and help you make more satisfying food choices.

Highlights

Our cravings for specific nutrients in our food pull us to eat more until we reach the bliss point, which aligns with maximum palatability and overall energy intake.   Modern processed foods are engineered to hit multiple bliss points to maximise profit at the expense of our health. 

The table below shows the relative strength of each craving, showing that our cravings for energy are the strongest, while our cravings for nutrients are weaker.

nutrient	craving	bliss point
monounsaturated fat	49%	25%
saturated fat	39%	21%
sugar	29%	20%
net carbs	27%	46%
vitamin B2	24%	1.3 mg/2000 cal
carbs	23%	50%
sodium	22%	3000 mg/2000 cal
fat	22%	34%
vitamin C	22%	115 mg/2000 cal
potassium	18%	1150 mg/2000 cal
iron	11%	15 mg/2000 cal
protein	7%	15%

Trying to resist cravings with your willpower alone is often futile.  But once we go on the offensive by exceeding the bliss point nutrient intake, our cravings for empty calories subside.  

Your Powerful and Mysterious Cravings

If you’ve ever battled a craving for a particular food, you know we often feel powerless to resist them; for example:

• Many women crave chips and chocolate at ‘that time of the month’.
• Pregnant women experience intense cravings for unusual foods like pickles or cheese, presumably to get the nutrients the growing baby needs.
• In the face of severe nutrient deficiencies, some people experience pica, an eating disorder where they eat dirt, clay or chalk to satisfy their needs for minerals like iron or calcium.

But while we try to reduce cravings to one nutrient (e.g., chocolate because you need more magnesium), as you’ll see in this article, our appetite is complex and multifactorial. The foods we crave are designed to simultaneously hit numerous bliss points (e.g., fat, sugar, and salt).   

The Science Behind Why We Crave Certain Foods

Sadly, we do not have randomised clinical trials to understand our cravings because depriving a large group of humans of specific nutrients for extended periods would be unethical and extremely expensive.  

Unlike weight loss drugs that allow us to turn off our cravings for nutrients, there is not much money to be made from a study that recommends eating nutrient-dense food, so hard research on our nutrient cravings is still sparse. 

Thus, the dietary reference intakes are based on the limited available research in humans and animals to understand the minimum nutrient intake that most people can survive on most of the time. 

However, if we believe we are not born with an Ozempic deficiency and nature doesn’t make mistakes, there must be a physiological reason for our cravings.  As you will discover in this article, the relationship between the nutrient profile of our diet and our cravings can provide valuable insights into managing our cravings and satiety.

Satisfying our cravings with nutrient-dense foods can empower us to make healthier, more satisfying food choices.

Craving, Satiety and the Nutrient Bliss Point

Our data analysis reveals precisely how our appetite constantly strives to find the perfect balance of nutrient intake.  While often annoying, our cravings are critical to ensure we get the nutrients we need from our food.

Have you ever noticed how the first bite of a delicious meal tastes terrific, but by the end, you are less interested? This is called sensory-specific satiety—your body’s way of saying it has had enough of certain nutrients and is ready to move on to something else.

Nutrient-poor foods (like plain sugar, rice, flour, or oil) taste bland and unappealing, while nutrient-dense foods have a much stronger taste, signalling to our bodies that we do not need much of them to get the nutrients we need (Forde & McCrickerd, 2016).  

The balance between craving and satiety is known as the bliss point.  This perfect Goldilocks zone between too little and too much is also the nutrient concentration that aligns with maximum energy intake. 

A nutritious meal with the right balance of nutrients vs energy is pleasant and satisfying.  Meanwhile, food scientists work hard to find the bliss point between these extremes to maximise palatability and profit. 

Optimal foraging, a process that worked well for wild animals (and humans before modern agriculture), has been disrupted by the creation of foods designed to hit our bliss points and satisfy our cravings.  In the past, we only had access to these foods for short periods when the seasons changed. 

These foods drove us wild and ensured we gained plenty of fat to survive the coming winter.  However, today, we are surrounded by these foods designed to be crave-able by precisely hitting our bliss points. 

Carb Cravings

Most people have experienced carb cravings, especially after intense activity or when they slash carbs when they start a low-carb diet.   

The chart below shows the craving-satiety response to non-fibre carbohydrates (i.e. total carbs minus fibre) in percentage terms.  In the middle of the chart, we see that we eat the most when our diet contains 46% carbs.    

We see a similar pattern with total carbohydrates (i.e. including fibre). Towards the left, we see a 23% reduction in energy intake when we move total carbohydrates from 50% to 24% and a 20% satiety response when we move from 50% to 74% carbohydrates. 

Where do most people end up? Yup! It is right in the middle, with carb intake that aligns with maximum energy intake.  

We have two options to avoid the bliss point. 

1. We can go all in on carbs with a very low-fat diet, to the point that our body gives us the full signal because our liver and muscles are stuffed with glucose (but minimal energy from fat) or
2. Opt for a low-carb diet, which also aligns with eating less. 

Food Addiction Satiety Index

Although ‘carb cravings’ are a shared experience, carbohydrates don’t make the cut as a statistically significant factor in the latest iteration of our Food Addiction-Satiety Index. 

The pie chart below shows the weighting of the 13 factors that empower us to more accurately predict how much we will eat based on what we eat. 

While it is convenient to use a single factor (e.g., protein, carbohydrates, sugar, energy density, etc.) to guide our food choices, as you can see from these charts, each nutrient provides some value. But when we combine them with the weightings shown in the pie chart above, we get a much more robust prediction of how much we will eat.  

The Food Addiction-Satiety Index has been a labour of love that has undergone many refinements over the past six years. We used a more complex formula (Gaussian + exponential decay function) to model each curve in this latest iteration. All of the craving-satiety curves have been optimised together to isolate the impact of that nutrient alone.   

Sugar

As we can see in the chart below, sugar provides a clear craving-satiety signal, with a bliss point at 20% of calories.  The data suggests that people who consume no sugar eat 29% less than people who hit the bliss sugar bliss point. 

Avoiding added sugar is wise if you are on a lower-carb diet where most of your energy comes from fat. Simultaneously hitting the bliss points for sugar, salt, and fat will drive you to consume way more energy than your body needs. 

But intriguingly, the data also shows that if all you had to eat were fruit, you would consume 28% less than those eating foods optimised to hit the sugar bliss point. It’s not that sugar is good or bad; the combination of sugar, fat, salt, and other nutrients is the secret recipe to ultra-profitable processed foods.

Sodium

Sodium is another nutrient for which we have a conscious, specific appetite. Without sodium, food tastes bland, but salt makes the other flavours pop. 

As shown in the chart below, people who eat a very low sodium diet are likely to consume 22% less than those who hit the bliss point of 3000 mg/2000 calories.  However, at the other extreme, we will eat less if our food quickly tastes ‘too salty’ because our body knows it will have to work overtime to flush the excess sodium.

You can assume that any processed or packaged food has been optimised to hit the sodium bliss point.  Aiming for a low salt intake will make your food taste bland and help you eat less.  However, if you are trying to lose weight and have eliminated processed foods, adding extra salt can help you crush your hunger for sodium and make the weight loss journey easier.

Fat

The data analysis shows a distinct bliss point at 34% fat. 

People on a very low-fat diet tend to consume 22% less energy than those who hit the bliss point for fat, with most of the rest coming from carbs.  However, at the other extreme, a low-carb diet, with the majority of energy from fat, can lead to a 24% reduction in energy intake.  

Monounsaturated Fat

When we examine fats, the spotlight shines brightly on monounsaturated fat (MUFA). Those who derive 25% of their energy from MUFA tend to consume a staggering 49% more than their counterparts, who have minimal monounsaturated fat in their diet. This revelation underscores the significant role of MUFA in our dietary habits and energy consumption. 

Although monounsaturated fat has been anointed as the ‘heart-healthy fat’, there is no denying we are consuming a lot of it these days!  Over the past century, the availability of fat, mainly from refined seed oils, has increased by around eight hundred calories per day per person.   

Saturated Fat

Saturated fat follows a similar trend but with a smaller craving response (39% vs 49%), a bliss point peak at 21%, and a small drop at higher saturated fat intakes (where less energy comes from monounsaturated fat). 

Polyunsaturated Fat

When we compare the different fats, we see that monounsaturated fat has the most significant impact on our energy consumption. Meanwhile, polyunsaturated fat, which only makes up a small proportion of our energy intake, has a much smaller effect. 

The chart below, from from Winter to Summer: How Micronutrient Cycles Influence Your Diet, shows that, even in our modern environment, each energy source cycles throughout the year.  However, the different energy sources cross in spring and autumn, creating a hyperphagic blend of energy sources that drive us to eat more than in winter and summer and gain weight.  Today, ultra-processed food tends to combine these various energy sources in a way that would never occur in nature, leading us to eat a lot more than we need to. 

You probably do not have to worry about the fat in your whole foods, which contain one dominant energy source, but the combination of ingredients in processed foods is much more likely to hit multiple bliss points and lead you to eat more. 

Protein

We have a conscious umami taste that signifies protein in food. 

When we look at protein, we see a small (6%) craving response that draws us to the protein bliss point.  However, once we get more than 15% protein, we experience a much stronger satiety effect (Raubenheimer and Simpson, 2015). 

In our Macros Masterclass, we delve deeper into the role of protein and other nutrients in managing cravings and satiety. We encourage people to move towards a diet with 40% protein, which aligns with a 43% reduction in energy intake. 

This is achievable for most people on a lower-carb diet.  However, 40% protein is the 92^nd percentile in the general population.  As you can see in the chart below, most people gravitate to the 15% bliss point for protein.  Employing other satiety factors beyond protein leverage provides a more robust and versatile approach to empower people to increase satiety.

Calcium

Michael Tordoff’s work has identified that humans and animals have a taste receptor for calcium (Tordoff, 2012), which may be partly why many people feel addicted to cheese and dairy. 

When we look at calcium, we see a 7% craving response that draws us to keep eating until we hit the bliss point of 700 mg/2000 calories of calcium.   

Specific Appetite

According to professors Raubenheimer and Simpson, animals—including humans—possess specific appetites for protein, carbohydrates, fat, and at least two micronutrients—salt and calcium.  Their 2022 paper, Integrative Approach to Dietary Balance across the Life Course, noted that specific appetites for other nutrients likely exist.

Specific appetite refers to a physiological craving or desire for a particular type of nutrient or food that provides a specific need or deficiency driven by the body’s internal mechanisms to correct nutritional imbalances. Understanding and managing our specific appetites can be vital in making smarter dietary choices and maintaining a balanced diet. 

Specific appetite, also known as hidden hunger, does not necessarily mean we have a conscious taste for a particular nutrient and can operate on a subconscious level.  In The Role of Gut Nutrient Sensing in Stimulating Appetite and Conditioning Food Preferences, Ackroff & Sclafani suggest that the taste receptors in the gut (chemosensors) combined with positive dopamine reinforcement play a role in reinforcing habits and craving for nutrients that we don’t necessarily have a conscious taste for. 

Rather than waiting for randomised controlled trials, we have used a supervised machine learning approach to identify the craving-satiety signal to nutrients, enabling us to predict how much we’ll eat based on what we eat.

Iron

Iron is another nutrient of public health concern, particularly in developing countries with limited animal-based foods.  Iron has a metallic taste, so it makes sense that when our iron intake is high, we will experience sensory-specific satiety.  But we also see an 11% craving that draws us to the iron bliss point. 

Potassium

While we do not usually perceive a conscious taste or craving for potassium, pure potassium powder tastes bitter in large amounts, ensuring we don’t overeat it. 

Interestingly, when we look at the craving-satiety response to potassium, we see that people who hit the bliss point for potassium (1100 mg/2000 calories) consume 18% more energy than those who get negligible potassium.

According to Dr Paul Janinet, humans evolved in an environment where sodium was scarce, but potassium was plentiful, so we did not need to crave potassium consciously.  However, today, this situation is reversed to the point that potassium is a nutrient of public health concern.  Today, we must go out of our way to seek foods that contain more potassium, mainly because it’s not used in food fortification. 

Vitamin C

Interestingly, we also see a robust craving-satiety response to foods with vitamin C.  People who hit the vitamin C bliss point (115 mg/2000 calories) eat 22% more than those who get negligible vitamin C. 

On the other side of the curve, we also see a similar satiety response to a robust vitamin C intake. The peak in response suggests that we crave slightly more than the dietary reference intake of 90 mg/day (for men). 

Vitamin B2

We also see a robust craving-satiety response to vitamin B2. The bliss point aligns with the dietary reference intake, so getting the recommended minimum B2 also aligns with maximum energy intake.

Practical Tips for Managing Cravings

Our extensive satiety analysis shows that the most powerful way to crush your cravings without excess energy is not to try to fight your cravings with willpower.  Instead, you need to go on the offensive by ensuring your body gets enough of the nutrients your body is craving.

Once you get more than the bliss point (minimum), your cravings will turn to sensory-specific satiety, and your cravings for less optimal foods designed to hit your bliss point will subside. 

Adding nutrient-dense foods will help you proactively crush your cravings by providing a higher concentration of all the essential nutrients with less energy.  In our Micros Masterclass, we guide Optimisers to transform their diet to ensure they pack all the essential nutrients they need into their daily energy budget. 

Meanwhile, high-satiety foods target only the nutrients that align with eating less. In our Macros Masterclass, we guide Optimisers to evolve their diet to maximise satiety for effortless weight loss with less cravings.   

Master Your Nutrient Cravings for Better Health

Cravings are not just a matter of willpower; they are your body’s way of communicating nutrient needs.

Understanding how cravings work and the delicate balance between hunger, satiety, and nutrient intake can empower you to make smarter dietary choices. Focusing on nutrient-dense foods can satisfy your body’s cravings without overloading with empty calories.

Next time a craving hits, don’t ignore it. Decode what your body needs and reach for more nutrient-dense options.

Ready to take control of your cravings once and for all? Join our Macros Masterclass and discover how nutrient-dense foods can help you crush unhealthy cravings, reduce calorie intake effortlessly, and achieve your health goals.

More

• Food Addiction-Satiety Index
• The Science of Bliss Points in Food: Unlocking the Secret to Addiction
• The Role of Minerals in Cravings, Hunger, Satiety and Health
• Agnostic Nutrition: Beyond Belief-Based Diets
• Discover Why Nuts and Seeds Are So Irresistible