Albany

A pregnant woman's urge for chocolate may be all in her head — and her culture.

At least that's what two University at Albany researchers think.

Cravings and weight gain in pregnancy may be due more to perceived permission to eat high-calorie foods than fulfillment of nutritional needs, UAlbany Psychology Department researcher Julia Hormes and graduate student Natalia Orloff speculate. With collaborators at Albany Medical College, they are launching a study that follows women through pregnancy and afterward to examine their hypothesis.

Their thinking is based on their earlier work involving women's cravings around menstruation as well as a review of other studies on pregnant women.

"In the United States, both PMS and pregnancy may act as socially acceptable excuses to overindulge," Hormes said.

According to Hormes and Orloff's review of existing research and posts on pregnancy-related blogs, 76 percent of women crave at least one food item by the second trimester of pregnancy. Popular cravings do not carry many nutritional benefits, they found. Most are high in calories and sugar, including ice cream, chips, chocolate, pizza and various fast foods.

Related research has shown that pregnant women who are perpetual dieters or suffer with eating disorders tend to gain more weight than others, Hormes said. This lends credence to the idea that women may be using pregnancy to indulge in foods they would normally deny themselves, she said.

While women in other countries report pregnancy cravings, they are not primarily for high-calorie foods and do not appear to lead to an increased risk for excess weight gain as they do in U.S. women, according to the UAlbany researchers. The most common cravings reported by a sample of 595 Tanzanian women, for example, were meat, fish, fruits, vegetables and grains.