Food cravings, aversions and pica are common during pregnancy and may have a significant input on pregnancy progress and outcome. A study was carried out to determine the frequency and duration of pronounced dietary cravings, aversions and pica during pregnancy among 204 pregnant and lactating women attending two health facilities in Dar es Salaam City, Tanzania. Nausea and vomiting were report...

Food cravings (FCs) are associated with overeating and obesity and are triggered by environmental cues. The study of FCs is challenged by difficulty replicating the natural environment in a laboratory. Virtual reality (VR) could be used to deliver naturalistic cues in a laboratory. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether food related cues delivered by VR could induce greater FCs th...

Food cravings are a common, yet poorly understood phenomenon. Past attempts to explain them with a focus purely on physiological mechanisms have been unsuccessful. Four studies examine the hypothesis that food cravings are best conceptualized in terms of socio-cultural and psychological factors, looking specifically at the example of perimenstrual chocolate craving. Study 1 demonstrates that th...

Strong cravings for unhealthy foods and implicit tendencies to approach them threaten the physical mental health of vulnerable populations. Yet, measures food have methodological limitations, as existing approach-avoidance tasks (AAT) are often unreliable require specialized hardware. We propose a novel method measure biases: on touchscreen, participants slide their hand either toward item (and...

Green-plant membranes, thylakoids, have previously been found to increase postprandial release of the satiety hormone GLP-1, implicated in reward signaling. The purpose of this study was to investigate how treatment with a single dose of thylakoids before breakfast affects homeostatic as well as hedonic hunger, measured as wanting and liking for palatable food (VAS). We also examined whether tr...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Prevalence of adolescent obesity has increased worldwide. Although diet and exercise patterns are major determinants of weight, recent studies with adults and children have shown that total amount of sleep is inversely associated with body mass index (BMI). The purpose of this study was to examine associations among total sleep time (TST), hunger, satiety, food cravings, ...