In other words, we all eat food that tastes great but is unhealthy. The part that we like is chewing it and enjoying the taste in our mouths. It would be great to do only that and then just spit it out and then turn to less tasty food and swallow that for the health benefits. But our bodies seem to need us to also swallow the bad (tasty) food in order to be satisfied. Why is that?
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Food tastes good to us as an incentive to eat it. Our bodies evolved this to make us eat food that is calories dense specifically for our (over) nutrition; our body is much more worried about starvation than obesity. So that appealing flavor is almost inherently tied to us actually swallowing the food, rather than spitting it back out.
I have alwaysss wondered this. Why is wine tasting where you swish and spit a valid thing but doing the same with food is not?
The good feelings of eating aren’t just taste and mouthfeel, but the feeling of tasty food going down the tube to your belly.
Think of dogs. They loooove tasty food, but don’t savor it. Nope, they go right for the satisfying swallow. Sometimes not chewing at all!
“Bad” food is tasty because it usually has lots of fat, salt and sugar. Our bodies crave these nutrients because they are quite beneficial (as long as they are not eaten to excess).
Some processed foods can be genuinely bad for us, but this isn’t due to the fat, sugar, and salt that we crave but rather because they are mixed with inedible preservatives that have unhelpful effects on our body.
Your body is able to analyse exactly how much of each nutrient that you ingest, and reward you for it! Eating is pleasurable not just because of the flavours but because of the neurochemical rewards that your body gives you for eating the right nutrients.
You can’t really trick your body into thinking you’ve eaten something that you didn’t actually eat. However, you can learn to derive more pleasure from eating things like vegetables by practicing mindfulness while you eat them.
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