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