Why do we as humans enjoy unhealthy food more than healthy food?
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Our bodies are designed to use fats or sugars (carbohydrates) as fuel. We have evolved to have taste buds that reward us seeking out these kinds of foods because our body needs them. This has then been hijacked by our systems of commercial civilisation so that the amounts and kinds of carbs/fats don’t stem from those “natural” resources and are “refined” or “processed” into something far more potent, foreign, and, therefore, harder for your body to efficiently deal with.
So fats and sugars are tasty because your body needs them most for the easy access to energy.
We actually enjoy both. It’s just that before civilization, as hunter-gatherers, we were unlikely to get too much of the unhealthy foods. Today, in most societies, there’s no natural brake on our appetites.
With healthy foods, that’s okay. It’s hard to eat too many green vegetables, for example. But, with foods that are unhealthy in excess, the fact that we can easily eat to excess is problem.
Evolution takes a long time. So our bodies are still built to be really really good at staying alive the way the very first humans had to. Which means that enjoying things high in sugar and fat meant enjoying healthy fruits and eating high calorie meats.
If a human in that condition bulked up it would likely get burnt off from the constant activity needed to survive so the human liking that thing was better for them surviving.
Modern unhealthy food sort of takes advantage of those old instincts and abuses them, our bodies haven’t evolved for a concept like “too much sugar” so when we taste sugar our bodies sends good signals so we want more foods like that to get more good signals.
What we tend to define as unhealthy are foods that tend to be very calorie dense. In other words they contain a lot of calories per gram of food we eat. More calories density mean we can eat more calories in one stomach full.
This is important from an evolutionary standpoint because for a the vast majority of human history we didn’t have a stable source of food. Our ancestors would go through times of excess and times of starvation. So our brains evolved to enjoy things that would give us a lot of calories at once which we could pack away as far stores. Those fat stores would then be burnt and keep us alive when we had little to eat.
The problem is we have brought that ancient instinct to modern times when for some populations have plenty of food. Some never go through a lean time. Yet their brains still tell them that sugar and carbs are good because they will give you calories for later when there is no food. When the reality is the body just ends up packing away more and more fat for starvation that may never come.
Fat and sugar used to be less readily available so we ate as much as possible when we could.
Fat and sugar are now very readily available, but our brains haven’t changed so we still crave large amounts.
Short answer: Because we are lazy.
The food humans generally find enjoyable is anything energy dense, unhealthy food are usually packed with all that good stuff, fats, sugar, proteins, a large amounts of salt to enhance flavor.
The simple reason that all of human history untill very recent, getting food has been time and resource intensive. So we evolved to like anything that would keep us alive the longest.
Picture a starving caveman – he’s hours away from keeling over dead because he hasn’t eaten in weeks. And then, by magic, in front of him appears a healthy kale salad, and a rich chocolate cake. Which does he go for?
The chocolate cake is the obvious winner, but in this situation it’s actually the *healthiest* possible choice for him, because the calories (mostly from carbs and fat) in that cake will sustain our caveman and keep him alive. The kale salad will fill him with vitamins and fiber, but that doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t contain enough calories to keep him on his feet much longer. It doesn’t matter how useful those vitamins are to keep his skin healthy, his hair full, his eyes working their best, and so on. He’ll be dead anyways.
Our bodies and brains are conditioned by millions of years of evolution to think of ourselves as that caveman – starvation is a constant worry. So we store excess calories as fat, in case we can’t find food tomorrow. And we crave carbs, fats, and proteins, because those are dense, important sources of energy. Vitamins are a secondary concern, because staying alive is priority number one, staying healthy in every other way is only priority number two.
Because most of us are lucky enough not to be in the situation that caveman is in, we don’t have a problem getting enough calories – we have a problem with *excess* calories in our diets. So instead, we’ve learned to find ways to prefer a balanced diet including healthy, vitamin-rich food so that while we’re meeting our caloric needs, we’re also getting enough vitamins, minerals, fiber, etc. to keep everything else running smoothly. The only thing that makes calorie-dense food unhealthy is that it contains more calories than we need, while not providing a lot of vitamins to go along with those extra calories.
Humans enjoy food that is healthy and keep us alive like fat and sugar.
Fat and sugar is only unhealthy in really large amounts and a lot of people consume it in really large amounts.
We don’t necessarily, but what you might think of as “unhealthy” is usually perfectly healthy in moderation.
Sugary things enable us to easily transform food into energy, and high calorie foods enable us to go for longer without getting tired.
We occasionally crave micronutrients (vitamins & minerals), but its the macronutrients we really like (fat, protein, carbs).
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