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
We’ve evolved to respond to certain cues from our food, not to the food itself. For example, you don’t crave “simple carbs to use for high speed running.” You crave something sweet, which in our ancestral environment is a cue that the food contains simple carbs. We enjoy fatty foods for the same reason, and those containing protein as well: calories we need. And for most of our history, more was better, because there was rarely enough.
In the present day, we have engineered flavors that are much stronger stimuluses than than what’s in nature. In nature, ripe strawberries are sweet and we enjoy them. Nutella is like a thousand times sweeter. Your gustatory system doesn’t know that it’s artificially engineered and not nutritious. It doesn’t know it doesn’t need to stock up for the future. It just knows “wow, this must have so much of the nutrients I need.”
Now, if you project out over millions of years, is it possible humans slowly evolve a preference for more nutritious foods? Yeah, it’s possible. It’s not likely – we might be stuck on this path – but you never know.
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