Why do humans have a preference to over eat or over indulge and not just be satisfied with what is needed to sustain their life and health?
In: Biology
For the vast majority of human history (history of all life, really) food was scarce and you spent most of your time just trying to get enough to eat. When you were lucky enough to have _too much_ food, overeating let you pack on the fat that would keep you alive when food _wasn’t_ plentiful. Folks that didn’t overeat during the good times starved to death in the lean times.
It has only been the last 100 years or so that food insecurity has ceased to be a prevalent issue in the Western world. You and I aren’t worried about not having food to eat tomorrow. The problem is that the instincts that kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years are still there, so we are hard wired to overeat even though we _know_ there is no reason to.
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