Couldn’t our biological organisms just prefer the healthy food? It would give us larger chance of survival so genes preferring healthy food should be more popular.
In: Biology
By default there is no healthy or unhealthy food, unless you are talking about literal poisons. You need a balanced diet with the right amounts of each nutrient. This does mean that you do need some sugar in your diet but not too much. And you need some salt in your diet but not too much. Humans have evolved to crave foods that are hard to come by. So when there is not much food available you would eat the most energy dense and the food that gives you the most important nutrients first.
But as food have become more available you tend to get too much of this food, making it unhealthy. We can even see this change in our lifetime. The food pyramid from the 1960s had carbohydrates like bread, pasta and potato as the staple food that you should prioritise. And this was good advice at the time because a lot of people did not have enough money for a full diet. Carbohydrates was a cheap way to get enough energy. If you are hungry and only have $10 to spend at a fast food place then you should get the fries and not the chicken. But if you have enough money to buy anything you want then a chicken salad is much better then fries.
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