“unhealthy food” is not really a thing, it is the amount that matters. Food usually taste good because it is full of calories something the body needs to function, the problem is most people get too many calories already
“Unhealthy food” isn’t really a precise categorization… the unhealthiest food would be something like strychnine, which has an intensely unpleasant taste. Other unhealthy substances like alkaloids tend to have very unpleasant flavors, because they are unhealthy.
Things that taste good, like fat and sugar, are sometimes termed “unhealthy” because they can be if you eat massive amounts of them. However, in relatively-small quantities they are not unhealthy at all; and incidentally, these things tend to appear in small quantities in nature. Sugar a phenomenal energy source, but pretty hard to come by, and fat is calorie-dense and contains a lot of important nutrients which are otherwise hard to find, but again, fat is relatively hard to come by.
For 99% of human evolution, we were eating naturally-occuring foods (rather than products of agriculture, farming, and processing), so our tastes are tuned to naturally-occuring levels. Sugar is rare but really “good for you” (in the sense that it keeps you going for another day), so we really like sugar.
TLDR: Unhealthy food tends to taste awful. Energetic foods taste great because they are excellent survival foods, and we are tuned for survival. Too much energetic food can cause obesity, cholesterol issues, etc.
Humans evolved in a time where food was extremely rare and you were very likely to starve to death. Any food is good food in those circumstances, and the best foods were fatty (energy), protein rich (energy + growth), sweet (energy), and salty (electrolytes to keep our nerves working). There also weren’t processed foods, so in the act of eating anything, we also got the nutrients we need, so it wasn’t important to taste them.
Fast forward to now, and food is so abundant and processed that the things we are hard-wired to want can be consumed in such abundance and stripped of so many nutrients that it becomes actively harmful to eat. We basically did what our bodies told us to do too well on a societal/industrial level.
Because most unhealthy stuff falls into one of two categories:
Things that are “new,” like preservatives that our body isn’t evolved to process, therefore causing issues
Things that are actually good and that our bodies need, but used to be relatively limited in nature. Things like sugar, which our bodies need to function but which we would only be able to find small amounts of at a time in the wild, and therefore evolved to eat as much of it as we can when it’s around, or evolved not to worry about eating too much because “too much,” was never a practical concern. Of course, now we have ready access to these things whenever we want, but our bodies still treat them like they’re scarce resources both in how we crave them and how our bodies store them, so it becomes a problem.
To incentivize us to eat it. The “best” tasting foods are often sugary or filled with carbs, oils and fats. These things taste great to us because in a survival situation they will go further than other less filling diets.
We find them appetizing so that we eat our fill of them as we don’t always know where our next meal will come from.
The craving of this food and our response to it are nature’s way to ensure that we eat the calorie dense foods when they ARE available.
A double bacanator with fries would be very healthy for a prehistoric human who may not have eaten in a couple days. These things are only unhealthy in the amount we eat of them
Because your body is trying to encourage you to eat the things you need to eat, but it doesn’t know what you need to eat. So it makes you crave salty things and sweet things and fatty things to get you to go hunt for meat and fruit. Which used to work fine, because you ate a lot of meat and carbs. So people with those tastes survived well.
Now we know how to make foods that do specifically what your cravings are sensitive to, and those foods aren’t the same as what your body would get in the wild. So you feed your fat craving without eating meat, and you feed your sweet craving without eating fruit, so your body still needs meat nutrients and fruit nutrients, so your body tells you to go get more fat and sweet things, because that’s all it knows how to tell you to eat.
Eating foods that are processed to be maximally delicious and expecting to be healthy is like pleasuring yourself and expecting to have a baby. You’re exploiting a sensory desire for the sensory reward without doing the beneficial thing the desire would normally make you do.
Our bodies evolved to crave foods that had a lot of necessary nutrients, but were difficult to come across for most of human evolution. For instance, we crave sweet things because fruit is sweet and wasn’t always readily available to our early ancestors, and it contains vitamins our bodies need to function. We crave umami flavored things because meat is umami flavored and it was the most nutrient dense food our early ancestors had access to. Same goes for salty things and fatty things. Our early ancestors who had a strong drive to seek out those foods were more likely to survive and pass on the genes that gave them that strong drive.
Fast forward to modern times, it’s not longer difficult to get access to sweet, salty, and fatty foods, but we still crave them. Add a capitalist food marketplace into the mix and everyone is competing to offer us the foods we crave the most at the lowest possible prices. This means they’re maximizing the salty, fatty, and sweet flavors but there’s less incentive for them to add the essential vitamins and nutrients (beyond calories from fat and sugar) that the natural salty, fatty, and sweet foods also contain.
Because when you’re surviving in the wilds, you want fat, protein and sugar (and salt).
As simple as that. You need them calories.
Ain’t got no one got time to develop diabetes when they’re dead from starvation or eaten by a bear or catch a simple bug. It’s only when you start living to old age that that bad food starts to take its toll.
Comments
“unhealthy food” is not really a thing, it is the amount that matters. Food usually taste good because it is full of calories something the body needs to function, the problem is most people get too many calories already
it’s because of what the food is processed with. sugar and salt and syrups taste good because we make it taste good with flavourings and sweeteners
“Unhealthy food” isn’t really a precise categorization… the unhealthiest food would be something like strychnine, which has an intensely unpleasant taste. Other unhealthy substances like alkaloids tend to have very unpleasant flavors, because they are unhealthy.
Things that taste good, like fat and sugar, are sometimes termed “unhealthy” because they can be if you eat massive amounts of them. However, in relatively-small quantities they are not unhealthy at all; and incidentally, these things tend to appear in small quantities in nature. Sugar a phenomenal energy source, but pretty hard to come by, and fat is calorie-dense and contains a lot of important nutrients which are otherwise hard to find, but again, fat is relatively hard to come by.
For 99% of human evolution, we were eating naturally-occuring foods (rather than products of agriculture, farming, and processing), so our tastes are tuned to naturally-occuring levels. Sugar is rare but really “good for you” (in the sense that it keeps you going for another day), so we really like sugar.
TLDR: Unhealthy food tends to taste awful. Energetic foods taste great because they are excellent survival foods, and we are tuned for survival. Too much energetic food can cause obesity, cholesterol issues, etc.
Humans evolved in a time where food was extremely rare and you were very likely to starve to death. Any food is good food in those circumstances, and the best foods were fatty (energy), protein rich (energy + growth), sweet (energy), and salty (electrolytes to keep our nerves working). There also weren’t processed foods, so in the act of eating anything, we also got the nutrients we need, so it wasn’t important to taste them.
Fast forward to now, and food is so abundant and processed that the things we are hard-wired to want can be consumed in such abundance and stripped of so many nutrients that it becomes actively harmful to eat. We basically did what our bodies told us to do too well on a societal/industrial level.
Because most unhealthy stuff falls into one of two categories:
To incentivize us to eat it. The “best” tasting foods are often sugary or filled with carbs, oils and fats. These things taste great to us because in a survival situation they will go further than other less filling diets.
We find them appetizing so that we eat our fill of them as we don’t always know where our next meal will come from.
The craving of this food and our response to it are nature’s way to ensure that we eat the calorie dense foods when they ARE available.
A double bacanator with fries would be very healthy for a prehistoric human who may not have eaten in a couple days. These things are only unhealthy in the amount we eat of them
It doesn’t; five pounds of baking soda would pretty badly mess up your digestive system, and it would be awful to eat.
Food that tastes good because it has lots of fat and sugar, however, can be unhealthy if it takes up too much of your diet.
Because your body is trying to encourage you to eat the things you need to eat, but it doesn’t know what you need to eat. So it makes you crave salty things and sweet things and fatty things to get you to go hunt for meat and fruit. Which used to work fine, because you ate a lot of meat and carbs. So people with those tastes survived well.
Now we know how to make foods that do specifically what your cravings are sensitive to, and those foods aren’t the same as what your body would get in the wild. So you feed your fat craving without eating meat, and you feed your sweet craving without eating fruit, so your body still needs meat nutrients and fruit nutrients, so your body tells you to go get more fat and sweet things, because that’s all it knows how to tell you to eat.
Eating foods that are processed to be maximally delicious and expecting to be healthy is like pleasuring yourself and expecting to have a baby. You’re exploiting a sensory desire for the sensory reward without doing the beneficial thing the desire would normally make you do.
Our bodies evolved to crave foods that had a lot of necessary nutrients, but were difficult to come across for most of human evolution. For instance, we crave sweet things because fruit is sweet and wasn’t always readily available to our early ancestors, and it contains vitamins our bodies need to function. We crave umami flavored things because meat is umami flavored and it was the most nutrient dense food our early ancestors had access to. Same goes for salty things and fatty things. Our early ancestors who had a strong drive to seek out those foods were more likely to survive and pass on the genes that gave them that strong drive.
Fast forward to modern times, it’s not longer difficult to get access to sweet, salty, and fatty foods, but we still crave them. Add a capitalist food marketplace into the mix and everyone is competing to offer us the foods we crave the most at the lowest possible prices. This means they’re maximizing the salty, fatty, and sweet flavors but there’s less incentive for them to add the essential vitamins and nutrients (beyond calories from fat and sugar) that the natural salty, fatty, and sweet foods also contain.
Because when you’re surviving in the wilds, you want fat, protein and sugar (and salt).
As simple as that. You need them calories.
Ain’t got no one got time to develop diabetes when they’re dead from starvation or eaten by a bear or catch a simple bug. It’s only when you start living to old age that that bad food starts to take its toll.
Because the humans we evolved from didn’t have abundance of it and they really needed the energy to survive thus calorie dense food tickles our brain.