Health: How To Curb Your Cravings

Do you have foods you crave? Chocolate, perhaps? Potato chips? Cheeseburgers? Food cravings are common and problematic, because they can lead to overeating that undermines health and promotes obesity. But there's not much agreement about what their cause may be or how to manage them.

One theory is that indulging food cravings--especially for energy-dense foods like ice cream and candy--is an expression of chronic stress, triggered perhaps by cortisol, the hormone that mediates stress. Such cravings might have made evolutionary sense in times of scarcity. Now, with energy-dense food available in every convenience store, they work against us....

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