Chocolate is the most commonly craved food in America. That’s because there’s lots of women in America. So what’s the deal with women and chocolate?  Are these cravings physiological?  Is it your body telling you it actually needs something that's found in chocolate? Or maybe the cravings are pharmacological.  That is, does chocolate actually have a drug like effect on your body? Or are the cravings psychological?  In other words, it's just all in your head?
    
    Maybe it's all physical. You know, “hormones.”  After all, we know a lot more women than men crave chocolate. In fact, cravings seem to get much worse just before menstruation, when estrogen levels are moderate and progesterone levels are very high.

What’s more, we know that stress increases the loss of magnesium from your body.  It's interesting that both chocolate and cocoa powder contain very high levels of magnesium.  We also know that magnesium deficiency can contribute to symptoms of PMS.  Now we’re getting somewhere, this makes perfect sense.  If you're under a lot of stress, or you don't eat enough magnesium because of an unbalanced diet, then that magnesium deficiency will aggravate your PMS symptoms and you desire a high magnesium food like chocolate.  Oh, if it were only that simple.  Unfortunately, kidney beans, lentils, and mackerel have a lot more magnesium than chocolate does, and I don't see too many women claiming to be mackerel-a-holics.  No, that’s not it.
    
    It's also been suggested that a brain neurotransmitter called serotonin goes down before menstruation.  Since eating carbohydrates can increase serotonin levels, this might explain a woman's desire for more pasta and breads and cereals.  More

“comfort foods.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t explain her specific desire for chocolate.
    
    Could it be that chocolate is having some kind of drug like effect? Sorry, chocolate does not qualify as an addictive substance in the true sense. A true addictive substance will cause actual chemical changes in the brain. True addicts also develop a tolerance for the substance and suffer withdrawal pains as well.  While chocolate and cocoa powder do contain some substances that can give your brain a sense of well-being, they have so little of it that you would have to eat between 50 and 100 pounds of chocolate at one sitting to get any real chemical effect.  I bet even you don't eat that much chocolate.
    
    Here's the bottom line. Those that study this kind of thing tell us that food cravings in general, and chocolate cravings in particular,  really come down just to the human desire for pleasure. Period. Plain and simple.  When we feel stress, depressed, or anxious, the body's natural response is to desire a pleasurable feeling. Even when we’re not hurting, we still like pleasure.  Our bodies simply perceive fat and sugars as pleasurable. And there's nothing on the planet that so uniquely combines the pleasures of fat and sugar at the same time as does chocolate. The complex flavor, the aroma, the texture, and the way it just melts in your mouth, (not in your hands!).  There's nothing that spells pleasure like chocolate. That may be why the average woman eats eleven pounds of it a year.