Why do unhealthy foods like junk foods taste delicious and addicting while healthy foods like vegetables dont?
In: Biology
Senses of taste and smell are the result of a long and messy evolutionary process. They’re tools that help us steer into eating things that we probably want (foods loaded with sugars, fats, proteins, vitamins) and steer us away from things that could possibly harm us (poisons). But along the way we’ve also managed to be able to taste completely neutral things, completely by chance. And the way some of these compounds interact with our evolution-tuned sensors can be, well, weird. While we are hyper-sensitive to the primary flavors we want, basically all foods occurring in nature are mixed bags of flavors that merely happen to have a couple of those things we actively seek out. All those other random flavors are just bonus. How these extra flavors affect you is down to a lot of factors, many of them hopelessly random. Humans weren’t necessarily tuned to like or dislike these flavors, so you may love some, hate others, and your tastes will evolve with time and exposure.
Contrast that to junk food, which is the result of an army of labcoats getting together and saying to themselves, “what if we invented a product that had ONLY those really good flavors that we were evolved to seek out in it?” Making them nutrient-packed isn’t exactly the primary mission here, flavor is the only concern, as that’s what sells. That’s how we’ve ended up with foods that are irresistibly delicious, but have almost no nutritional value.
Eat enough junk food regularly enough, and you’ll become so acclimated to being surrounded by so much easy gratification that even the most benign errant flavors like those present in some vegetables will just be so… *bad* by comparison. I mean, disregarding the merits of health and adventurous eating for its own sake and focusing purely on the idea of primal senses, why would you *want* to eat a potentially mixed bag of flavors when something that is literally engineered to be composed *only* of *good* flavors is so readily available?
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