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How are food cravings formed?

Why do you often recall grandmother's pies with inimitable filling and dough, mother's cutlets of a unique appearance and degree of "burntness", father's fried fish with the smell of something incomprehensible, firmly entrenched in your memory? Why sometimes your memory persistently brings you back to a casserole from kindergarten, perhaps not very beloved at that time, but also an unforgettable taste that I would like to repeat?

Interest in the consumption of certain foods or dishes from them is laid in early childhood and accompanies a person throughout his life. As we grow up, we try more and more new food products and, comparing them subconsciously with the taste characteristics memorized from childhood, we leave the products in our diet or refuse them.

From the moment of birth, memory involuntarily captures the taste of chemical compounds entering the body in the form of food and programs the pleasure of consuming them. And everything that is connected with pleasures, the body fixes "tightly" and diligently pushes a person to the renewal of pleasant sensations from the consumption of the products he likes. A person has genetically programmed aversion to bitter, and a preference for sweet (this is how taste buds are arranged), but, nevertheless, it is quite possible to accustom the body to consume bitterness in the form of a drink or dish.

It is the same with salty foods. If in early childhood the child's diet required lightly salted food, then in the future life he will calmly manage with a minimum of salt and will not even notice the unleavened dish, which will seem to him to be the norm of taste. And products generally accepted in terms of salinity or specially salted products (dried fish, stockfish, sausages, salted preserves, etc.) will seem to him excessively salty and unsuitable for nutrition.

Scientists believe that aromas are to the same extent fixed from infancy in the subconscious, which allows a person in the future to be guided by precisely those types of aromas that were present in his life from birth to about six years of age. So, for example, the smell of vanilla, spicy herbs, which was present in dishes of early childhood, will be pleasant to a person even after many years (twenty - thirty years later).

Thus, a love for the national cuisine, for certain dishes, for the degree of their salinity, sweetness, sour taste and bitterness is formed, and this is a fairly stable phenomenon. Such an early formation of food addictions allows, starting from childhood, to develop a correct and healthy approach to food consumption in a person, which in the future will allow avoiding diseases associated with an excess of glucose, fats or salts. It will be natural to choose your favorite foods from a selection of healthy foods.

Therefore, you should not develop a weakness for sweets in children, allowing them to eat sweets, lollipops, pastries, cakes, kozinaki, halva, preserves, jams, etc. It is better to replace all this with fresh fruit. Fatty creams, cream, high-fat ice cream, fried potatoes in all their forms, pieces of bacon, sausages, deep-fried dough are not needed for a healthy life. They will change the work of the endocrine system, damage the pancreas, liver, and promote obesity. Salted nuts, dried squid, as well as the entire set of this salty food waste should be excluded from the diet in early childhood, then in adulthood a person will not have to "pull himself together", making superhuman efforts to educate willpower and self-control on low-calorie diets.