Why can’t I be addicted to broccoli or something?
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High calorie content foods are hardwired into our genetic as a survival instinct from times when food was hard to come by.
Google.
“Processed foods are mainly salt, sugar, fat and preservatives — all of which create a combination of different sensations in your mouth. Your brain is involved as well. Foods that rapidly vanish or ‘melt in your mouth’ signal to your brain that you’re not eating as much as you actually are. In other words, these foods literally tell your brain that you’re not full and you need more of the food. It sounds so good, but actually, you are not fueling your body, but burdening it to work very hard to metabolize junk food.”
Basically,they make you feel good(innitialy) and wanting more.
And if you start eating broccoli,you will adapt and start to liking with time,but never to the point of getting addicted to it.
Addiction is not a good thing.
I think you’re taking the issue in reverse. It’s not that junk food has a naturally addicting taste. It’s that junk food is made to be addictive.
Sugar, salt and fat are three very good thing for your body… when you are an early human that isn’t certain he’ll have another meal tomorrow. Sugar is energy, salt help keep water and fat is slow burning energy. So our body got used to these three things being good for us.
But we’re now a few thousand years later, many people regularly have three meals a day. These “good” things have reached the tipping point of being too much. We don’t burn Sugar or fat faster than we consume it, and we have more than enough salt to hold our water.
Yet, our body didn’t adapt away from it. It still feel like it’s a good thing.
Then companies started trying to sell us stuff. And they realize that we buy more if it taste good. And unfortunately, the stuff that taste good (sugar, salt and fat) also happen to be very cheap nowadays. So they put load of “good stuff” in the junk food.
Because they are specifically designed to be. Sugar, Fat and Salt can all be addictive in their own way, so fast food relies heavily on these to boost the flavour beyond what is ‘natural’. Even good tasting natural foods aren’t really addictive, because they don’t taste anywhere near as strongly.
Believe me, if you slathered broccoli in salt and sugar and artificial flavourants and deep fat fried it, you’d probably get addicted to that too.
Junk food is often highly palatable, meaning it tastes really good. This makes it hard to resist because it triggers our natural reward system in the brain. Junk foods are also often high in sugar, salt, and fat, which can make them even more appealing. Additionally, junk food is often readily available and easy to access, making it even harder to resist.
Junk foods are often very high in sugar, fat, and salt, which can trigger the release of dopamine in the brain. This dopamine release can create a feeling of pleasure, leading to an addictive response. Additionally, many junk foods are highly processed and engineered to be full of flavor, making them hard to resist.
Your brain thinks it’s far more likely that you will starve next winter than die of heart disease because any people whose minds didn’t work that way mostly aren’t here today.
Junk food is packed with easy to digest calories, which is amazing if you’re in danger of actually starving, but far fewer people are starving today.
The body is trained to crave sugar, fat, carbs, salt because it needs energy and other components to thrive. Man is still evolved toward scarcity mentality where demand for such nutritional elements was way higher than what was typically available… from times of cavemen to 1800’s (and even still in some parts of world). It’s only in the past 100 years, in western society, where we have basically unlimited access to sugar, fat, carbs but our evolution hasn’t had time to adapt.
There’s a symbiotic relationship between many plants and the animals that eat part of them.
Imagine wild horses and a wild apple tree. If the tree spreads by apples just falling to the ground it will not do well, and the Grove cannot bridge barren sections.
But if a wild horse eats an apple, the horse can walk/gallop a few miles before passing the seeds.
The seeds get a pile of warm and moist manure to start growing roots in, and the horse gets a tasty snack.
While the seeds are immature on the tree, the fruit is bitter, but when the seeds are mature, he fruit turns slightly sweet, and the horses can smell the sweetness.
In this way, mammals developed a taste for sweet fruit and vegetables as a means to acquire sugar, to convert to energy.
Now, we have concentrated granulated sugar and high-fructose-corn-syrup, allowing us to consume way more calories than we could naturally. Everything is sweet now, and many things are extra sweet.
Plus as far as burning calories, humans were never intended to sit still in cubicle all day.
It’s like drinking whiskey every day, instead of an occasional beer and then watching TV instead of going for a walk.
Why is junk food addictive? – it’s filled with sugar and artificial substances designed to send our tongues into sensory overload of flavors which our brains just love, in essence you wouldn’t stop taking crack as well it simply has much more visible negative effects.
Why can’t you be addicted to vegetables? – Well this can be due to many reasons, one of which is poor diet during childhood which facilitates your food choices later on in life unless you go experimenting a lot and trying new stuff to see if you like them(parents play a great role in children life and eating habits and preferences are no exception)
Another reason entirely could be that you’ve not had well prepared ones, there are a ton of recipes online which are tasty and easy to make and don’t cost an arm and a leg
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