The next question that was written in, which is a great one, is mind-stuff — what different foods says to our brain or why we crave what we crave. “Yesterday’s info about sweets was fantastic to hear.” Excellent question. It has to do with cravings and why our brain is doing what it does. There are a couple of different things in terms of different types of cravings. I mean, actually, there could be cravings for anything, right? I know a lot of individuals, especially when they are going through pregnancy, will experience cravings for things you would never think you would crave, for example.

The most common cravings are for the flavors that we identify. Umami, which is sort of a meaty craving — and I think most of us have often times, you have a sense for something like rich and meaty like a steak or eggs or just something that’s got that meaty hearty flavor; of course salty and of course sweet; and then textural cravings such as crunchy is very common and something that we’re going to be helping within the coming months in terms of providing some SANE superfoods there. Stay tuned to get USDA approvals. That is in the works, which is awesome.

Why our brain craves these things and what we can do about them. There are many, many different triggers for cravings in the last session, which we haven’t watched; I’d highly recommend watching. We got some deep metaphysical stuff covered there in terms of emotional eating and the emotional aspects of things so I won’t go too deep into that in this session. Cravings can be caused by, from a scientific perspective, nutrient deficiencies. Often times, when an individual is pregnant, will experience some type of cravings because the body is craving certain types of nutrients. There’s also cravings for sometimes people who have gone on extreme – sometimes — this is not a criticism; this is just something that people experience sometimes on vegan-type diets — people experience severe cravings for things like meat or protein-rich foods simply because the body is seeking out those nutrients.

While the body doesn’t know meat has protein in it, we have certain tastes buds for a reason. The reason sweet tastes good to us is because, over many, many years, our taste buds and our brain and our hormones have said, “Hey, things that are sweet are generally not toxic and they generally provide a lot of energy.” So human beings who liked sweet things had a higher likelihood of having babies which meant that there were more and more human beings that liked sweet things. Whereas, for example, things that taste rancid, taste rancid for a reason. You’re never going to crave something that tastes rancid.

There are cravings because of nutrient deficiencies. There are cravings simply because – like, we crave sweet things because sweet things used to be very scarce and if we found sweet things in a world where famine was common and where we were hunting and gathering, it was in our best interest to just eat as many of them as we possibly could and to really like sweet things because certainly if we didn’t we would have had no incentive to eat those energy-rich sweet things. Same thing with fatty; same thing with salty — is that foods with these intense flavors used to be very, very scarce. The reason we crave them now is actually the same reason we craved them then. The more we crave something, the more likely we are to do it or to engage in it when we were in a food scarcity environment that was beneficial.

Of course, the challenge we face today is we have the exact opposite problem. We have corporations that are engineering food, which is an oxymoron. When you think about it, you can’t engineer food. Anything that’s engineered isn’t food; it is a food-like product. They’ve tapped into those cravings and they’ve created what’s called hyper-palatability, which is a level of sweetness, a level of saltiness, a level of the umami flavor. Umami is again the meaty flavor. The synthetic form of the umami flavor is MSG, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. There’s also things like natural flavorings which just triggers certain receptors in our brain and over-stimulates them.

The challenge with this is, these food-like products are so stimulating that they do three things. One is, they’re just toxic in general so that’s bad. The other two things that are involving cravings which are very troublesome is, first and foremost, they desensitize our brain and our taste buds to these flavors. By way of example, just like someone who drinks a lot of alcohol will need to drink more alcohol to get the same effect because they are literally desensitizing their body to the effects of alcohol, when we eat things that are hyper-palatable or unnaturally sweet, for example, soda or, for example, candy or any refined confectionary product that contains refined sugar, this desensitizes us to the taste of sweet.

While it’s natural to have sweet cravings in the normal natural state of the human mind and the human body, we would crave sweet but we would crave sweet and then we would fulfill that need for sweet with natural nutrient-dense sources of the taste of sweet such as berries or other SANE citrus fruits or even non-genetically modified crazy apples — which are totally different and that’s a separate issue we can talk about how things like bread and apples that we eat today are fundamentally different in terms of their nutrient breakdown and nutrient density than they were even two generations ago, for example. They’ve been hybridized and such. We will have a craving for sweet but then we will often be given things that are hyper-sweet which cause us to only be able to fulfill that craving with things that are even sweeter.

Alcohol’s actually a good example. If alcohol is used in excess, there’s this downward spiral where if we keep turning to alcohol, we can need more and more and more until it destroys our liver and can have a very negative impact on our lives. The same thing can apply for cravings of sweet or salty or fatty. There’s nothing wrong with sweet or salty or fatty. There’s a reason that we crave those things. Fatty foods, as you know, are not bad for us. There are very healthy fatty foods. What’s bad for us are synthetic foods that have been engineered to hijack those tastes and to desensitize us to those tastes.

We talked about obviously these craving compounding foods are unnatural and synthetic, which is bad in and of itself. Two, they desensitize those taste buds so that we need more and more of a substance. I think for a lot of people in the Ignite family, you may already be experiencing this where, as you detox from some of those things, real food that maybe didn’t taste sweet in the past starts to taste sweet. I think the most common example of this people talk about is baby carrots where things like baby carrots or even citrus fruit, as you detox from unnatural sugar, natural sources of sugar start to taste much sweeter and much more delicious in that sense. So the sweetness becomes desensitized.

The last very negative thing — again, the original question was, Why do we crave what we crave? We crave what we crave because traditionally things that we crave were scarce and they aren’t bad for us when consumed in their natural form in natural quantities, but they’ve been engineered to go crazy nowadays. The third thing is that these hyper-palatable foods that take these flavors and desires which are natural and healthy and takes them to the nth degree, they cause such a — when you naturally crave sweets and fatty foods and salty foods and you consume them from natural sources, as we talked about last week in detail so I’m not going to go too deep into it, you do have dopamine, serotonin, other types of receptors in your brain, those are satisfied in a way and you say, “Hey that was good and I feel satisfied and full.”

I often make the distinction between feeling full and feeling satisfied. I think we’ve all experienced that. You can feel physically full but not feel satisfied. I know I feel that way because I have a sweet tooth. I can be full but not satisfied until I have something sweet and that’s why I love SANE sweets. Instead of just having that feeling of satiety and feeling satisfied, what these hyper-palatable substances do is they make our brain go into overdrive. I hate to bring up things like alcohol and drugs but, in a lot of ways, the foods that we are given nowadays are more similar to drugs than they are to food. If you think that sounds a little bit silly, please just look at the nutrition facts. Look at the ingredients. Read them. They sound more like a collection of pharmaceuticals than they do food. It’s like crazy cyclohexylmethanol. You’re like, “What in the heck am I putting into my body?”

If you think of a pharmaceutical or a drug such as Ecstasy or MDMA, what they do is just cause the natural sense of euphoria or joy that is natural and healthy to feel in our brain to just such a crazy high level, which again just sort of pushes that ceiling up where now our brain is going to say, “Oh my gosh, that was so good. I mean, it was too good.” We are then going to compound those cravings even further because our brain wants to experience that again and that’s when these addictions can form because our brain wants to get back to that hyper-normal state and that’s of course not healthy.

In summary, why do we crave things? We crave things because, in their natural form, things like salty, sweet, umami, fatty are good and if we didn’t crave them, we wouldn’t eat them; if we didn’t eat them, our ancestors would not have lived. So that’s why we crave them. We also crave them because they do trigger a reaction in our brain which, for example, if you feel anxious or depressed or angry, the chemicals that they release in our brain can help to appease those. The challenge we face is that the food stuffs that we’re served today desensitize us so it takes more and more of these flavors to resolve our cravings. Further, they sort of increase our expectation for what sweet tastes like so you can only get a sweet or salty or savory fix from these unnatural substances.