Why is candy and chips, the sweets the salts and the fats, so tasty for humans compared to healthy snacks like a carrot? I mean why haven’t we created a healthy snack that everybody likes instead of injecting so much sugar in a simple oranje juice that is becomes kind of unhealthy? I am shocked by the duality of it all, something that tastes supernice is mostly superbad for our health 🙂 And i guess for animals it’s the same like you could feed any animal a bar of chocolate and he would eat it even if it probably poison him right? Is there a scientific explanation?
In: Biology
Good quantities of nutrients are tricky to come by “in the wild”. So your body craves essential things.
We need salt, we need carbs, we need fats. So in nature, if you find a source of those, you want to consume them. We are programmed to want to eat them.
Then, it’s rare in nature to get fat and sugar together. It turns out that in combination, they are quite addictive.
So we crave these foods, because as an animal, we don’t know when we will get nutrition again, and thus want to eat them.
Also, salts and sugars actually as preservatives, so they make manufactur d products last longer, which is better for the seller.
Anso, companies research the best ways to make their products moreish, compelling us to keep buying and eating.
In short – we are slaves to our animal cravings and manufacturers play on this.
Tasty foods are not bad for you – quite the contrary. They are very good for you. The issue is that they are bad for you _in excess_.
For most of human history, getting enough food was a huge deal. We are genetically programmed to gorge ourselves on high-calorie, high-nutrient food (carbs, proteins, fats) when they are available because there would be times coming when they are not. Building up some fat reserves in the good times kept you alive in the bad times.
Things changed about 150 years ago – food is plentiful now (in the West at least) and we don’t need to gorge ourselves out of fear of not having a next meal. The problem is that the instinct hasn’t been bred out of us yet, so our bodies still gorge ourselves when the food is available, not knowing that there will always be a next meal readily available.
Evolution. We are wired toward high calorie foods for survival.
Sweet means easily converted to energy. Fat means calorie dense storable. Salt is vital to survival and was/is not always available in nature, so when it is we gorge on it.
A food you find in nature is probably somewhat healthy, because we evolved to eat the things we find in nature at about the same rate we were able to grow or hunt them.
If you’re trying to manufacture a product to compete with those in the market, you’re going to fully optimize for taste. All you care about is that when someone finishes it they come back to buy another one. You don’t care about how healthy it is at all, subject to complying with existing regulations.
So you’ll always sacrifice healthiness for taste if you’re faced with that choice. The end result is a mixture of stuff in proportions you’d never find in nature, without all the vitamins and micronutrients that nature naturally puts in everything. And it’s designed to make people want to eat too much of it. It would be incredibly unlikely for something like that to randomly be healthier than natural foods when you paid zero attention to making it healthier.
Because things like sugar and salt and fat, things we need to live, were in short supply when we were but primitive monkey-men. So we were naturally inclined to seek them out whenever possible, and eat as much as possible because you never know when you’re getting another meal.
Nowadays it’s literally everywhere, so we consume too much of it, because our instincts still tell us to consume as much as possible. Our stupid monkey brains don’t know or care that we have farms and factories now.
Our bodies also want to hang on to fat as much as possible, because in the wilderness it comes in handy to store energy. That’s why losing weight is hard.
When animals were evolving, it was quite difficult to get large volumes of fat, sugar and salt into your diet. Our bodies didn’t evolve a defense against overindulgence because access was scarce so over-eating wasn’t a problem we faced.
Our tastes evolved to encourage us to put in *extra* effort to get these types of foods because they’re really important for our development.
Now, we’ve made it possible to get as much fat, salt and sugar as you can eat. Our bodies only evolved to tell us to get more; they never evolved to tell us when we’ve had enough.
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