Why do kids find unhealthy food tastier than healthy food?
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Imagine 500,000 years ago. You’re an early hominid, very similar to a human. Your body requires certain nutrients to operate. You need air and water, obviously.
You also need salt, because it helps your cells draw water into them. But you can’t just drink saltwater, because too much salt will draw the water from your cells before the cells can take in the salt. So there are only a few places you can get salt from. So the main source of salt in the diet is animal meat, which takes a lot of energy to get. So it’s rare. Because it is rare, and your body needs it, evolution causes humans to desire it, since those who seek it out have a better chance of survival.
You also need fats, or oils. Fats are calorie dense, so eating a small amount will help you survive longer. They are also necessary for healthy cell function. Just like salt, humans who had a greater desire to find and eat fats were more likely to survive, so evolution causes more humans to desire fats.
Sugar, specifically glucose, is how the body delivers energy around the body. Our bodies work to turn food into mostly glucose, and a few required nutrients and minerals that help cells with healthy operation. There are different kinds of natural sugars, like fructose from fruit, which can be more or less easily digested by the body to become energy. Another term for sugar is carbohydrate. Complex carbohydrates can be healthier for the body, maybe because we evolved to digest them regularly. There are plenty of unhealthy sugars which add no nutritional benefit, which are the kind of sugars we usually think of when we hear “sugar”. But our body treats them the same way. We’ve evolved to crave sugar, but too much of a good thing is bad.
Now imagine today. You no longer have to struggle to seek far and wide for these precious minerals and molecules which your body needs to operate. They are abundant, but the evolutionary drive to consume them remains.
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