Mysterious Cravings? : Research: Cravings, accepted theories hold, are the links between foods and the feelings from childhood they evoke.

A true story: A friend of mine in Seattle recently got a hankering for pizza. Seattle has plenty of pizza, but it doesn’t have Pizzeria Uno, the legendary joint that hooked my friend on Chicago deep-dish pies years ago.

Usually, my buddy can make do with any old oregano-flavored bread dough, but on this particular day he was like some 1,200-pound moose in mating season. He had to have Pizzeria Uno.

Lucky for him, America is a country where you not only can grow up to be president, but you can satisfy eccentric food cravings too. Only $169 later, my friend had his Chicago Pizza--via air courier.

Few men go to such lengths to indulge food cravings. Most probably won’t even admit they’re slave to certain snacks. Real men might eat quiche, but they’re not supposed to crave it.

The truth is, though, men do hunger after certain foods. Just ask Harvey Weingarten Ph.D., a McMaster University psychologist who recently conducted a survey of the eating habits of college students. More than two-thirds of the 385 men in his study confessed to food cravings. “Some craved a food almost daily. The mean was about five to nine cravings a month,” says Weingarten.

Psychologists have proposed the controversial theory that cravings are biological drives to correct nutritional deficiencies, a kind of wisdom of the body: We want what we need. But more widely accepted theories stress the links between foods and the feelings they evoke. Like Pavlov’s dog, we may be conditioned to seek out certain foods because of their positive associations--and avoid others because of the unpleasant memories they stir up.

“Bacon means breakfast; cake means birthdays; popcorn means movies, and macaroni and cheese can mean that you’ve run out of money,” wrote Canadian psychologist Bernard Lyman Ph.D., in his book, “A Psychology of Food.”

Even certain emotional states may provoke food cravings, according to Lyman. College students chose full meals over junk food when they were happy, ate hearty steak-and-potato meals when they were self-confident. When they felt sad and lonely, they chose soups, suggestive of hearth and home.

But let’s get down to cases. Here are the foods men say they crave the most--and why they crave them.

MEAT--Hamburgers, cheeseburgers and chicken wings were hits on Weingarten’s survey. Similarly, studies of food preferences of U.S. military during the past 25 years show men like nothing better than to sink their teeth into a thick slab of grilled steak.

Herbert L. Meiselman Ph.D., a leading U.S. Army food researcher, thinks the appeal of meat is simple:

“It’s flavorful.”

That’s it?

“Well,” he says, “men like to chew on things.”

Adam Drewnowski Ph.D., director of the human nutrition program at the University of Michigan, suggests another, albeit not entirely surprising, explanation. Meat-eating is manly, he reminds us, linked to hunting and our caveman roots. To some degree, then, men crave meat to live up to me-hunter, you-Jane sex roles.

PASTA, CARBOHYDRATES--”What is it about having meat and not potatoes?” asks Dr. Norman Rosenthal, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health. “When you see tuna, why does your brain tell you to have bread? I don’t think the flavor or texture of starchy foods really explains it. I think something more is going on.”

That “something more” may be simple habit, but some scientists suspect carbohydrate cravings are a signal to eat food that will bring about desirable mood changes.

Nutrients can alter the manufacture of neurotransmitters, the brain’s chemical messengers. One of these, serotonin, has a tension-relieving effect on the body. Studies by Judith Wurtman Ph.D, a researcher at MIT, show that carbohydrates trigger a series of chemical events that stimulate the brain to produce serotonin. Wurtman theorizes that we go after bread and pasta for their calming, attention-focusing effects.

ICE CREAM, CAKE, CANDY--Drewnowski points out that many popular snacks contain large amounts of fat. In fact, calorie for calorie, many sweets contain more fat than carbohydrate. Drawing on studies showing sugar-fat combinations such as ice cream are particularly irresistible, Drewnowski speculates: “So-called carbohydrate-cravers really are craving sugar and fat.”

Some animal research suggests high-fat and high-sugar foods stimulate production of endorphins, the natural opiate-like compounds in the brain. Drewnowski has found something similar with humans: Injecting subjects with a drug that blocked endorphins decreased their cravings for high-sugar, high-fat snacks such as M&Ms.; Thus, it’s possible that high-fat, high-sugar foods influence the same pleasure centers that heroin and other addictive drugs affect. The implication: Our sweet-fat tooth gets us high.

More traditional explanations for the drive across town at 11 p.m. to get ice cream emphasize the cool, creamy texture of a spoonful of Haagen-Dazs. A recent survey for Parade magazine found men are more likely than women to beat the blues with ice cream. While we can’t directly taste fat, it has a highly desirable mouth feel.

Of course, we may have first learned that desire in our high chairs if Mom and Dad used desserts as a reward for finishing meals. Our sugar habit also has a respectable evolutionary history linked to the need for energy and calories. The survival of our early ancestors depended on ripe fruit to provide nutrients, which probably created a built-in drive for sweets. Next time you reach for a little mocha chip, console yourself with the fact that you’re really fueling up to dodge saber-toothed tigers.

CHOCOLATE--”It packs a multiple whammy. Chocolate has lots of pharmacologic effects,” says Duke University psychologist Susan Schiffman Ph.D. That Hershey bar has tiny amounts of caffeine and another mildly addictive stimulant, theobromine, plus a smidgen of phenylethylamine (PEA), a possible chemical link to enhanced romantic feelings.

COFFEE--Java junkies are made, not born. Bitter and harsh, the taste of coffee is universally disliked by children, but we come to like coffee usually as a result of pairing it with milk and sugar. Of course, it helps that we get a pharmacologic kick from the caffeine. Major coffee drinkers display the classic features of addiction. When deprived, they go through mild withdrawal symptoms: headache, lethargy, irritability.

CRUNCHY, SALTY SNACKS--Back when we were all running around in animal skins, salt, an essential nutrient, was hard to come by. Thus, as with sweets, we seem to this day to be genetically driven to seek the stuff.

Snacks such as chips, pretzels and popcorn may also satisfy the need to crunch, Schiffman speculates. “They satisfy an urge to bite down on something during emotions like frustration and boredom.” Indeed, college students in Canadian studies by Bernard Lyman reported they preferred crunchy foods when they were angry, bored or frustrated.

SODA--”Primarily, it’s the carbonation,” Schiffman says of the craving for soda. “There is caffeine in colas, but the carbonation is what really turns on the nervous system. I’ve put catheters into people’s arms and seen the increase in adrenaline in the bloodstream after carbonated beverages.”

PIZZA--Topping the list for the men in Weingarten’s survey was pizza. Why the recent national mania for pizza, which has surpassed hamburgers as the nation’s favorite fast food?

“Multiple textures,” says Schiffman. “It’s crispy, crunchy and yet has a certain ‘elasticity’--it pulls back when you pull on it. Pizza is really like the banana split of entrees: You can enjoy so many different things in one product.”

Texture aside, pizza is a one-stop shop of the things we crave. It’s salty, packs a high fat content in the cheese and usually carries meat toppings. It’s got carbohydrates and the spices and, as Weingarten puts it, “the real lure, that fantastic aroma. . . .”

You don’t need to tell my Seattle friend that. He could smell it all the way from Chicago.