Why do we always tend to eat food that is calorie dense?
In: 3
Because at the end of the day we are still mentally and biologically wilderness animals that can never be assured of our next meal. If you can find calorically dense food (fat, sugar, etc…) then you go for it. Your brain will reward you for making this “good” decision that will assuredly keep you alive, and drive you to do it again next time you get the chance. The problem is that our genetics never foresaw a world in which we would ever have nearly limitless opportunities to eat absurd amounts of calories at will, every day, for decades. This has caused some issues, certainly.
Your body’s main source of energy is carbohydrates (AKA sugar). Your brain runs on sugar and cannot survive long without sugar. Low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia) can lead to coma or death if not treated quickly because your brain needs a constant level of sugar. Calorie dense food yields to more energy through cellular respiration (a reaction where your food gets broken down to energy). Therefore, your brain will send you cues such as cravings to eat a certain thing that is usually calorie dense (usually high in carbs). More calories > more energy. Some extra energy such as sugar gets stored in the liver for future use. It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism.
Because we still have some instincts from our primitive era regarding food. Calorie dense food is well, dense in calories. Calories were hard to come by in our primitive era, and anything with a ton of them will instinctually taste good to us.
Think of wild animals and human food (calorie dense food), they love our heavily processed food, because the calories are so dense and accessible.
Hacking. We like to pretend that we’re these magical independent things with autonomy and our own being, and that kind of thing… but in reality we are no more perfect that the computers we create… and no more secure. Corporations have long since learned that they can exploit hyper-normal stimuli to coopt vast swathes of the population into giving them money, so they do.
One way to see this is to realize that we don’t binge eat all calorically dense foods. Pecans are (exceptionally) calorie dense, when was the last time you ate a bag of those the way you’d eat a bag of doritos?
And this isn’t the only well-known and constantly exploited vulnerability in the human psyche either. Odds are you’re being exploited in all kinds of ways for the sake of the almighty, dollar.
**Because for like 99.9999% of evolutionary history, calories were scarce and unpredictable.** You were WAY more likely to die of starvation (due to sickness, drought, winter, injury) than somehow finding so many calories that you got fat. So we all evolved the strategy: “when you *do* find a high-cal food source, eat as much as possible!!” And in those calorie-scarce times, (aka essentially all of human history!) that was a great strategy to have. It kept your ancestors alive.
Calories becoming cheap and abundant for everyday normal people happened in the last ~200 years, which is a split second on the evolution timescale. There just hasn’t been anywhere near enough time to adapt to this yet. **So we’re all still running the “eat as many calories as you can find” program in our brains because that worked great for like a million years** and has only needed the “but not too much” asterisk for a tiny amount of time since then.
Because at the end of the day we are still mentally and biologically wilderness animals that can never be assured of our next meal. If you can find calorically dense food (fat, sugar, etc…) then you go for it. Your brain will reward you for making this “good” decision that will assuredly keep you alive, and drive you to do it again next time you get the chance. The problem is that our genetics never foresaw a world in which we would ever have nearly limitless opportunities to eat absurd amounts of calories at will, every day, for decades. This has caused some issues, certainly.
Your body’s main source of energy is carbohydrates (AKA sugar). Your brain runs on sugar and cannot survive long without sugar. Low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia) can lead to coma or death if not treated quickly because your brain needs a constant level of sugar. Calorie dense food yields to more energy through cellular respiration (a reaction where your food gets broken down to energy). Therefore, your brain will send you cues such as cravings to eat a certain thing that is usually calorie dense (usually high in carbs). More calories > more energy. Some extra energy such as sugar gets stored in the liver for future use. It’s an evolutionary survival mechanism.
Because we still have some instincts from our primitive era regarding food. Calorie dense food is well, dense in calories. Calories were hard to come by in our primitive era, and anything with a ton of them will instinctually taste good to us.
Think of wild animals and human food (calorie dense food), they love our heavily processed food, because the calories are so dense and accessible.
Hacking. We like to pretend that we’re these magical independent things with autonomy and our own being, and that kind of thing… but in reality we are no more perfect that the computers we create… and no more secure. Corporations have long since learned that they can exploit hyper-normal stimuli to coopt vast swathes of the population into giving them money, so they do.
One way to see this is to realize that we don’t binge eat all calorically dense foods. Pecans are (exceptionally) calorie dense, when was the last time you ate a bag of those the way you’d eat a bag of doritos?
And this isn’t the only well-known and constantly exploited vulnerability in the human psyche either. Odds are you’re being exploited in all kinds of ways for the sake of the almighty, dollar.
**Because for like 99.9999% of evolutionary history, calories were scarce and unpredictable.** You were WAY more likely to die of starvation (due to sickness, drought, winter, injury) than somehow finding so many calories that you got fat. So we all evolved the strategy: “when you *do* find a high-cal food source, eat as much as possible!!” And in those calorie-scarce times, (aka essentially all of human history!) that was a great strategy to have. It kept your ancestors alive.
Calories becoming cheap and abundant for everyday normal people happened in the last ~200 years, which is a split second on the evolution timescale. There just hasn’t been anywhere near enough time to adapt to this yet. **So we’re all still running the “eat as many calories as you can find” program in our brains because that worked great for like a million years** and has only needed the “but not too much” asterisk for a tiny amount of time since then.
Latest Answers