Why does eating food that’s bad for us bring us such great joy?
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Because the things that are in unhealthy foods (sugars and other chemicals) stimulate your reward senses. You get pleasure from them whereas eating lettuce doesn’t really stimulate anything. The sweeter something is, the more you feel the response and you get to craving it more and more. Kind of a vicious cycle and hard to break. Look up just how hard of a time people go through when going on a reduced/no sugar diet. It sucks at first.
Things like salt and sugar contain essential nutrients, and hard to come by in the wild, so our ancient ancestors developed a taste for them, which they passed on to their descendants, and learned to seek such foods out. Now that agriculture has made these things available to us in great abundance it is easy to get way more than we need, but it will take a long time for us to forget something so hard-wired into our brains.
In general it doesn’t; most things that are bad for us to eat (e.g. feces) also taste terrible.
Unscrupulous junk food companies take super-cheap food that people would normally know better than to eat, and carefully engineer it to taste good so that they can sell it to us anyway. (Usually by adding a bunch of salt, sugar, and fat, as other posters have described.) But that takes a lot of effort: the result tastes good *in spite of* being made mostly from garbage, not *because* it’s made mostly from garbage.
Admittedly, our ancestors evolved in a time of relative scarcity, so we’re wired to eat more than we should. So some stuff can be bad for us just because it’s “too much of good thing”. But I think you were asking mainly about unhealthy *types* of food, not unhealthy *quantities*.
Back in caveman times, salt and fat and sugar were rare and hard to get ahold of. We evolved to find them very tasty, so that we would have an incentive to go out and hunt for those rare treats. Salt helps regulate our body’s fluids. Fat and sugar give us energy. In limited amounts, those are fine.
The problem is that today, it’s not hard to find salt and fat and sugar anymore. We can get WAY too much. Too much salt messes with our fluid levels, and can cause high blood pressure. Too much fat and sugar makes us gain weight, and messes with our blood sugar levels as well. But our bodies still think we’re in an ice age, needing to get as much food as possible to survive the winter and hunt a mammoth.
So now, even though finding fat and sugar and salt tasty is causing problems for us, it’s been far too soon for evolution to react.
Hyper-palatability
They’ve identified the things that taste so great and packed them into foods to sell more products.
Because what makes it bad for us is something that we require, or has been very beneficion, to human diets. The problem isn’t the fat, sugar, carbs, salt itself its the fact that the food is often over loaded with them to cover up the taste of perservatives and make up for the lost flavor in removing things from the food to make them shelf stable.
Depends on what do you describe as bad. We don’t like rotten food, we don’t like anything with too much salt and we don’t like to drink oil too.
If you are talking about junk food. Earlier these kind of things were like festive meals for us. Because these were costly for us. So we used to like these. I think this is the reason we enjoy (and maybe it is about addiciton to some ingradients, that I don’t know)
Now we have come to know it is bad for us. it is not bad like poison. We are not balancing our diet properly. If we take balanced diet and do more physical activities then little bit of junk food is not bad.
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