You Didn't Choose Your Cravings, Someone Chose Them for You
Celine is the founder of The Health Detective, a holistic wellness practice helping women solve the health mysteries conventional medicine leaves behind. A Natural Nutrition Certified Practitioner and Metabolic Balance Coach, she works with clients across Canada and internationally.
Stand in front of an open fridge at 9 p.m. and you'll reach for something before you've consciously decided anything. Salty, sweet, familiar, your hand knows before your brain weighs in. Most of us call this a craving and leave it there. Case closed, so to speak.
But that reach isn't random, and it isn't necessarily recent. What most people don't know is that some of the influences behind it began developing before you could talk, let alone choose. Let's trace where some of them actually came from.
The pattern started before you could choose
Your taste preferences began forming earlier than you'd think, before your first solid meal, in fact. A landmark study published in Pediatrics found that flavours from a mother's diet can be experienced through amniotic fluid before birth and breast milk after birth. In the study, infants exposed to carrot flavour prenatally or through nursing showed greater acceptance of that flavour when they started solid food compared with infants who had no such exposure.
In other words, your food story didn't start with your first grocery run. Some of it started before you ever took your first bite of solid food.
Then childhood layered a second system on top of the first: reward. Every time a food showed up alongside comfort, celebration, or relief, ice cream after a hard day, a treat for good behaviour, dessert as the reward for finishing dinner, your brain could begin filing that connection away. Research on the brain's reward circuitry shows that food-related cues can become connected with reward, conditioning, and the desire to eat. The smell, the setting, the emotional state, any one of them can contribute to craving, whether or not physical hunger is the only thing driving it. This is the same territory I've traced before when emotional patterns quietly become metabolic dysfunction. The body doesn't separate feeling from function nearly as cleanly as we'd like to think.
For some of us, a third layer got added: scarcity. A 10-year longitudinal study following adolescents into adulthood found that severe food insecurity was a risk factor for later binge eating. Severe food insecurity significantly predicted a higher prevalence of binge eating five years later, even after researchers accounted for earlier binge eating and sociodemographic factors. For some people, chronic dieting, rigid family food rules, or a household where treats were tightly controlled may also reinforce a sense of urgency around food: eat it now, because you don't know when it'll be allowed again.
Three influences. None of them asked for your permission. All of them may still be shaping your relationship with food.
What this looks like now
It looks like reaching for bread the moment you walk into your mother's kitchen, regardless of whether you're hungry, because that kitchen taught your nervous system what safety smells like.
It looks like polishing off a bag of something salty during a stressful client call and only noticing the empty bag afterward.
It looks like feeling a flicker of guilt around dessert that has nothing to do with the dessert itself and everything to do with a rule from decades ago about what "good" eating looked like.
It looks like moving to a new country and craving a food from home so intensely it borders on grief because that food isn't just flavour, it's the last direct line to a version of comfort your body remembers precisely.
Yes, asking for a friend, it looks like standing at the fridge at 9 p.m., reaching for something before any conscious decision was made at all. None of this is a character flaw. It's memory, wearing an apron.
How to actually work with this
Name the layer before you judge the craving. Ask whether this could be a taste preference shaped by early flavour exposure, a reward association involving emotional pairing, or a scarcity response involving restriction and urgency. The response may be different for each one, so understanding the pattern matters before the plan does.
Separate the cue from the food. If a craving reliably shows up with a specific trigger, a phone call, a certain hour, a particular room, the cue may be contributing to the craving rather than genuine hunger being the only driver. Food cue research supports a relationship between cue reactivity, craving, and subsequent eating. Naming the cue out loud, "this is a 4 p.m. slump craving, not necessarily a food need," can create a pause in the automatic loop long enough to make an actual choice.
Support steadier blood sugar and appetite. Protein earlier in the day can support satiety and, in some contexts, help moderate glucose responses later in the day. Fibre can also contribute to fullness and a steadier eating pattern. This doesn't mean cravings are simply a blood sugar problem, but a steadier baseline may make them feel less urgent for some people. If bloating or digestive changes are part of your picture too, the gut has its own say in this, especially through perimenopause.
Rebuild scarcity-driven patterns with consistency, not restriction. If your history includes food insecurity or rigid dieting, adding more restriction may not address the underlying pattern. Working toward reliable, adequate access to food can help reduce the sense of scarcity and urgency around eating.
Get curious about your specific food history. Which foods feel emotionally loaded, and where did that charge start? A parent's kitchen, a culture's table, a specific season of your life? You don't need to solve it all at once. Naming even one inherited pattern may be enough to begin loosening its grip.
When it's worth a closer look
Bring in extra support, such as a registered dietitian, a therapist who works specifically with eating patterns, or a Natural Nutrition Certified Practitioner working within their scope of practice, if:
Cravings consistently override physical fullness, regardless of what you eat beforehand.
Guilt or shame around food shows up more often than genuine enjoyment does.
Eating patterns shift noticeably around stress, travel, or major life transitions and don't settle back down.
You notice cycles of restriction followed by eating past comfortable fullness.
Food feels like the only reliable source of comfort available to you.
None of this is a verdict. It's simply worth a proper look with someone qualified to help you look at it.
The bottom line
You didn't choose the influences behind your first food preferences. Nobody does. They were shaped by early flavour exposure, a childhood kitchen, and a culture's rules about what food meant and when it was allowed. What you can choose is whether those inherited patterns keep running the show unexamined or whether you finally get curious about where they came from.
That's the real first clue in understanding your relationship with food, not the fridge at 9 p.m., but the years of quiet conditioning that may have led your hand there before your mind caught up. Sometimes that trail leads somewhere unexpected too. Even a food you've never actually tasted can carry a story worth uncovering.
Read more from Celine | The Health Detective
Celine | The Health Detective, Founder of The Wellness Blueprint Life by Design
Celine is the founder of The Health Detective, a holistic wellness practice built on the belief that every body has a mystery worth solving. She is a Natural Nutrition Certified Practitioner (NNCP), Metabolic Balance Coach, and certified Health and Life Skills Coach, working with women across Canada and internationally who feel stuck, dismissed, or let down by one-size-fits-all approaches. Her work goes beyond nutrition she looks at the whole person, the whole life, and the patterns that most practitioners never think to ask about. She writes The Health Detective Files, a case-file style blog where symptoms become clues and health becomes personal. You can find her at thehealthdetective.ca.
Sources:
Mennella, J.A., Jagnow, C.P., & Beauchamp, G.K. "Prenatal and postnatal flavor learning by human infants." Pediatrics, 2001.
Volkow, N.D., Wang, G.J., & Baler, R.D. "Reward, dopamine and the control of food intake: implications for obesity." Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2011.
Hazzard, V.M., et al. "Associations between severe food insecurity and disordered eating behaviors from adolescence to young adulthood: Findings from a 10-year longitudinal study." Preventive Medicine, 2022.
This information is for educational purposes and doesn't constitute medical advice. Always consult healthcare providers about any health concerns.
