eli5 Why healthy food isn’t as good as fast food?
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Cause fat is a flavor carrier. It enhances the taste of food. Same goes to salt and sugar.
So the fatty sugary stuff and fatty salty stuff taste GREAT.
While vegetables that are steamed often lack fat which carries flavor.
Humans evolved to prefer the taste of fats and sugars, as they have greater energy density than other things. If we still lived in the wild, high-energy foods like meats would be better, as they would enable someone to go for longer without eating.
It is, but your taste buds have been conditioned to enjoy cheap, processed foods.
Once you cut fast food/overly processed foods from your diet and you give your taste buds time to adapt you’ll start to enjoy the taste of real food and you’ll be able to pick up on the subtle flavors. Processed foods will then start to taste weird (overly salty, “chemically”) because they will overstimulate your taste buds.
someone else said it already, but I’ll try explaining it myself
our early human ancestors obviously did not have fast food. they had to scavenge and hunt for their food, and had to eat whatever they could find in the wild.
in nature, foods that have things like fat or sugar would be things like meat or fruit, both of which are relatively energy-rich compared to gathered foliage.
salt, though not particularly energy-rich, is an important nutrient for our body and one of the few nutrients that is not really in much of the food we would have eaten, as any organism that takes in salt will just process it, since they need the nutrients too.
so our brains evolved to really enjoy fat, salt, and sugar, as they represented either calorie-dense foods that would give you the energy to keep going, or a vital nutrient that you can’t get anywhere else.
fast food just loads you up with some one of the three and manipulates your monkey-brain into thinking that you’re getting really awesome food that could keep you chasing mammoths for weeks.
The main reason is that people have evolved over time to enjoy higher calorie foods, which are high in sugar, fat, and/or protein. This comes from when we were hunters-gatherers, which was the case up until about 12,000 years ago. It’s much more efficient to gather and eat sweet, sugary berries than leaves with almost zero calories.
There’s a cultural element to it – healthy food is less often ‘aspirational’. There are very few children who grow up wanting to ‘eat their veggies’, and many more who think of adulthood as a non-stop parade of pizza and burgers.
I know that when I personally started making my own money, I would go and buy energy drinks and cookie dough to eat straight out of the package, not healthy things, because I could have healthy things whenever I wanted at home. Raising people to believe that unhealthy food is a ‘rare treat’ can mess them up when they gain the ability to make their own food choices, and can pretty easily and cheaply ‘treat’ themselves all the time.
The question implies a sharp distinction from fast food and healthy food, but [thats largely myth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-FBV3-pwDk&).
Fast food might lack a bit of fibre but if people choose to overeat it and then blame the food for their own choices then they’ve hit peak cognitive dissonance.
I’ve always wondered if it’s simply because so many people don’t season their food properly. Like yeah boiled, unseasoned brussel sprouts taste like shit, and unseasoned meat tastes bland, but if you properly season them, not only do they taste about as good as junk food, but sit a lot better in your stomach.
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