why healthy food are usually not that delicious? isn’t our body supposed to want to consume healthy food?

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why healthy food are usually not that delicious? isn’t our body supposed to want to consume healthy food?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Biologist here

That’s not really how our biology works. Our bodies crave fat, sugar and dense foods because that’s what provided our ancestors with energy. Sugar was extremely rare for most of humanity, and was a great source of energy, so our bodies rewarded us when we found it with that yummy good feeling. Fat was needed for energy as well.

We didn’t eat on a regular schedule for most our history, sometimes we would go days between meals, surviving off forging berries and roots. So our body rewarded us when we ate things like fat and sugar, high in calories.

Evolution is super slow, if humanity was a 24 hour clock, its only be a few hours of time in the grand scheme of things since we were hunter gatherers. Our bodies are still wired to reward us when we eat what was once incredibly needed and rare food sources

Anonymous 0 Comments

Delicious is subjective. Personally, I love most vegetables, and prefer them without butter and carrot cooked or raw (if they’re safe to eat that way). I also prefer lean meats.

That said, in general, we’ve evolved to crave salts, sugars, and fats. This is because they were harder to come by in previous years versus modern era where we can just go to the store and buy whatever junk food we want. They provide boosts of energy, which was great for hunting and not starving to death in winter.

Additionally, our neurons in our brains register sugar, salt, and fat as pleasurable. We release endorphins when we eat them.

Anonymous 0 Comments

When we say “healthy” today we often mean not eating too much, but the more typical problem in human history and in nature is not having enough. In most places it’s easy to find plants with some degree of nutrition, but if you try to survive on that alone you’ll starve. Stuff like salt and fat are an important part of your diet and their deliciousness is a good incentive to put in the work to get enough of them.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Different things taste different ways, everything that’s good for you didn’t arbitrarily decide to taste bad. Some healthy things are delicious, some healthy things are horrendous. Same goes for unhealthy foods, but there isn’t exactly a lot of demand for food that is both unhealthy *and* tastes bad.

Things like butter and sugar and oils make food delicious and can absolutely be healthy if eaten in correct amounts, but since they’re so damned tasty that people just want to eat way too much of it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Welll….you gotta develop a taste for it. Certain flavors and textures are very attractive to our brains because they signal lots of easy calories which is necessary if you are living in a situation where food is hard to come by….they give you a lot of energy. So sugar and fat are super attractive and in moderation are perfectly fine to eat. However with our modern diet there is way too much sugar and fat added to foods to make then highly palatable. We have to use our common sense to not get tricked into eating low nutrition foods just because our brain says SUGAR AND FAT! YUM!

Anonymous 0 Comments

Unhealthy food makes us addicted to them which means we get satisfaction(via chemical reactions) when we consume them. Our basic healthy foods of course do not cause addiction easily. One of the most innocent thing we take that makes us addicted might be coffee(caffein) and I would suggest taking them carefully and occasionally as well.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s very healthy to want to eat things like sugar and fat, if those things are hard to come by. And that’s how it was for our ancestors. They evolved in conditions where these were scarce, so it was healthy for them to crave sugar and fat so they wouldn’t waste any opportunity to obtain them.

Problem was, there was no reason for them to evolve an “off-switch” to these cravings, as there was never a real danger of consuming too much (I mean, in the short run if you eat a lot you do get satisfied and even bloated, but once you’ve passed food there is no mechanism in your body that tells you to limit your sugar or fat intake). Even in times of plenty, it made sense to “overeat” and build up some reserves for leaner times.

It’s only very recently that large populations of humans on Earth have developed the luxury of having access to as much sugar and fat (and more generally calories) as we want. So only now is the lack of an off-switch becoming a problem. And even then, very few people are dying of obesity-related health issues so young that they couldn’t have children, so there isn’t a strong selection pressure that would cause us to evolve such an off-switch (which would take multiple generations in any case). Instead, we have to use our willpower and conscious minds to limit our intake of these things, which often goes against our more primal urge to eat more – finish that pint of ice cream or that bag of crisps.

Of course, we don’t just need sugar and fat. We also need things like vitamins. So why don’t we crave those? Mainly because these were already pretty available in the diets our ancestors at, and you don’t need all that much. A single medium-sized orange contains roughly 100% of the vitamin C you need on average per day, and you don’t need to eat that much vitamin C every day as your body can hold some in reserve. And that’s how much you need for optimal health. Just to prevent scurvy, you need a lot less than that (more like one orange a week). In short, it didn’t take that many berries, nuts, seeds, edible roots etc. to fulfill our ancestor’s requirement of vitamins and minerals, but getting enough calories, enough fat and enough protein, that was harder (and often involved hunting rather than gathering), and so we evolved to crave the latter and not the former.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Processed and artificial foods have been engineered over decades to hit the reward centers in our brains.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Healthy food *is* delicious. But our palettes have evolved to drive us to seek out the most scarce and critical aspects to our diet: energy. We’re adapted to chase fat and sugar (and salt), because in nature, those were the hardest things to get. You’d get all the vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients you could possibly need, all while just trying to satisfy your brain’s need for carbs and fat.

So, now that we’ve mastered nature, and can grow far more carbs and fat (and refine enough salt), we can indulge the energy starved lunatic in our brain well beyond the point where it is healthy. And our bodies haven’t yet adapted to that abundance. It’s still in starvation mode, where every calorie is packed away for that day when you can’t find any potato chips.

Lastly, our palettes are *adaptive*. The same food isn’t necessarily safe to eat in every biome, and we’re adapted to learn what’s good to eat from our parents. So, when your parents feed you junk food and no vegetables, your don’t develop a taste for healthy food, you grow up a picky eater, and struggle with your weight for the rest of your life, because the only things that taste good are loaded up with fat, sugar, and salt.