Mood, food craving and food ‘addiction’ as causes of overeating

Abstract

It is not hard to find examples of effects of eating and drinking on mood — feelings of contentment and sleepiness often follow a large lunch, a cup of strong coffee is alerting, and eating chocolate may relieve tension, or cause the dieter to feel guilty. Some of these influences are related to individuals’ attitudes towards particular foods, whereas other effects are mediated by specific physiological actions of dietary constituents (e.g., Rogers, 1995). In turn, mood and emotion have been implicated as having an impact on food choice and food intake, and several of these hypotheses suggest a link between the mood effects of food and ‘food craving’.