And artificial flavouring doesn’t help either, since our brains map flavours to nutrients. Cravings for specific foods can be related to how much your body needs nutrients it associates with that food. But artificial flavours don’t come with any nutrients, they are just chemicals that mimic how the actual food interacts with our taste buds. So it can crave foods that do nothing to help with the nutritional needs, you’ll feel good for a bit because of how the body handles hunger (it subsides when we eat, not when we digest it and get access to the nutrients and calories, otherwise we’d always overeat), but then when the nutrient levels don’t change, it craves it again.

That’s how there’s so many people that are simultaneously obese and malnourished. The food has the calories and the body stores them for later use, but it doesn’t have the nutrition while foods have.