Food Craving Inventory UK

Most of us have experienced a food craving — a very strong desire to eat a certain food that seems like it just won’t go away. Researchers and clinicians are often interested in measuring how often someone experiences food cravings and how strong the cravings are. Some scales measure this in relation to a single food, like chocolate. (In the UK, chocolate is the most often craved food.) But sometimes we want to collect information on the range of cravings someone has too. Marney White and Carlos Grilo created the Food Craving Inventory (FCI) which achieves many of these aims in 2005. However, since a range of foods are involved, it is of course important that those foods are culturally appropriate. White and Grilo include lots of foods commonly consumed in the USA but which are not meaningful in the UK. For example, ‘biscuit’ has a very different meaning. Dr Wendy Nicholls and I developed a UK version of the FCI by updating the food list, adding a response scale, and conducting a separate exploratory factor analysis.