Why do kids find unhealthy food tastier than healthy food?
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Foods with high sugar AND fat are almost non existent in nature (outside breast milk) so we evolved to crave both for the quick energy they provide and now our thousands of years later finely-honed lizard brains get overwhelmed with bliss with these new fat sugary creations the last few centuries.
Although there’s definitely some biological component to this, I would honestly say the biggest reason is marketing.
Trash food has bright colored and fun marketing that gets blasted at kids constantly and they have dumb dumb child brains, so their brains go “must be good, it’s shiny!”. My kid literally wants to have his birthday at Chuck E Cheese because “it’s the best place to have a birthday party! They even say so!” Because he saw ONE commercial about it 6 months ago.
Think about McDonalds. It has a bright colorful sign, fun looking food packaging, toys with your food, and a play area. It’s even got a catchy jingle. It HAS to be the best food, right?? What about Dino Nuggets? I can get my kid the exact same nuggets but they will swear the ones shaped like dinosaurs are better tasting.
Capitalism is really really good at getting people to think cheap trash is better and especially when targeting children with child brains.
It’s not just kids, adults like unhealthy foods, too…we just hopefully show some discipline and keep our cravings in check. It goes back to when the human species was evolving, when food was far harder to acquire than it is now. The nutrients in fruits are of high value to our metabolism, so nature gave us a sweet tooth so we’d go out of our way to search out fruits. Fats are of even higher value, so nature made us love that flavor, too. If you’re not motivated to chase down a rabbit for dinner, you won’t get those nutrients and the energy they represent. So nature made us “like” the foods of high value, but which are hard to get.
Nowadays, the local minimart has as much sugar and fat as you want, for very reasonable prices. The cravings for sweet and fatty foods is pretty much obsolete, but we haven’t evolved out of them. Foods that cater to our innate sense of taste are trivially easy to get, and too much of them has become very much a bad thing.
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.
They don’t. Kids have no preference for “unhealthy”, so why does it seem that way?
There are a world of theoretical foods that are both unhealthy, and taste awful. Nobody sells those, for obvious reasons!
**So everything you see is either healthy or tastes good, or both.** Next, “unhealthy” is really when we eat too much of a food, not that it is bad in moderation.
So a food is labelled “unhealthy” when we eat *too much* of it. Why do we do that? In a wealthy country, we do it because it tastes awesome! Ergo, in practice, the available unhealthy food is tasty.
Humans naturally crave high calorie foods, since foods dense in calories ensure our survival during times of famine. The body wants as many calories as possible with as little effort as possible since chewing uses calories that are better spent on fighting off enemies. That is why foods high in fat taste better than low calorie foods. It’s a survival mechanism.
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