chocolate: women more than men?

We began our research for this study by questioning the science behind why women are known to crave chocolate. It is a well known stereotype that women crave chocolate, especially around their menstrual cycle, but is there any science behind it? According to Psychology Today, women experience a decrease in serotonin levels during their menstruation cycle. Serotonin is a “feel good” brain chemical that is often known as the happy chemical because it contributes to human happiness and wellbeing. Chocolate and other fatty foods trigger our brains to produce more serotonin. These foods also trigger more endorphins, which cause us to feel calm and relaxed. Endorphins are the same chemicals that are released when falling in love or exercising, which can give people a “high” feeling. The release of serotonin and endorphins is a possible explanation for why women crave chocolate so much.

Now that we know that there is some science behind women craving chocolate, we continued our research by looking for previous studies on this topic. We found a study published by the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health. Their hypothesis for the study is that women have greater cravings because of cultural norms in the United States. They wanted to test whether foreign born women have less chocolate cravings than women born into the United States. Although this is not exactly what we are studying, their data on cravings can still apply to our topic. Participants were a group of undergraduate students who received research participation credit for participating in the study. They completed a self-report questionnaire where they were given three questions: Have you ever experienced a craving for Chocolate?, Do you crave chocolate regularly?, and Do you experience menstrual cravings?. For each question, they gave a yes or no response.

Since our study is about women chocolate cravings in general, we chose to focus on the results for the Americans. This study showed that 92% of American women said yes to having ever craved chocolate. 36% said they have regular chocolate cravings and 33% said they have chocolate cravings associated with their menstrual cycle. This shows us that a pretty large amount of women said they crave chocolate. When compared to the “foreign” women studied, Americans did crave more chocolate. One thing about this study that we didn’t like is that they grouped all non-americans as “foreigners” and had foreigners from 30 different countries, so each country was only represented by a few people out of the 81 in the sample. Also, some of the foreign countries could have more of a craving for chocolate than Americans do, and other countries could have less of a craving than Americans do, and this would alter the “foreign” cumulative craving for chocolate. I think if each foreign country was individually sampled, it would be a better study because it could be shown where Americans rank in comparison to many other countries. See the links below for the science behind craving chocolate and the study we referred to above:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cravings/201410/women-and-chocolate

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5517000/