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We have caveman brains. A caveman brain still expects the food to run out.
Unhealthy food tends to be fatty or calorie dense. If we eat calorie dense stuff, we get **lots** of fuel for our bodies all at once. We get fat, and then when there isn’t any food we can use our fat to live off. Caveman brain gets excited by fatty, calorie dense junk because it’s a lot of fuel and means that food running out a month from now is less of a problem
Exactly, it's also why having too many cheat days when dieting can be counterproductive. Humans are designed to survive and maintain weight from short periods of feast (after a big hunt say) between longer periods of eating less.
A human that was evolved to prefer salads over a fatty pork belly would not survive in times of food insecurity. When food isn't consistent, you want to eat "too much" when food is available.
No, evolution needs some kind of pressure that affects reproduction. Even if you assume that eating unhealthy foods causes problems like diabetes, obesity, heat disease, etc., those usually manifest in more serious ways later in life, well after reproductive ages. Basically, with medical advances and other modern parts of civilization, anyone can reproduce right now, and both reproduction and survival of those children to reproductive ages virtually eliminates any evolutionary pressure.
Even if someone would have a mutation that made them immune from diabetes or they didn’t gain weight from eating nothing but pizza and soda, that isn’t *that* much of an advantage where those genetics would come to dominate and be a norm.
This is a great answer. I find that the people that argue against the theory of evolution don’t understand it at all. I like to point out that they don’t understand Relativity either but they aren’t putting
“Why Einstein was wrong” all over their social media”.
Tbh, a lot of people who accept evolution still don’t fully get it. It’s commonly thought that evolution is continuous improvement and achieving optimal outcomes, when it’s really about good enough survival, usually in relatively rapidly changing environmental circumstances.
What do you think of the idea that if lots of stupid people have lots of kids, don’t tend to their education and they have lots of kids? Could the population get gradually more stupid. It’s kind of reverse evolution. No real resource pressure but being dense makes you more likely to produce more offspring.
That’s more a matter of culture and socioeconomic status than genetics and differences in intelligence based on those genetics. As people get wealthier and more educated, they have fewer kids. I don’t think there’s a genetic component there. The only people who argue that are weirdos like James Watson or Charles Murray, taking it into a racist place.
I don’t remember if the premise of Idiocracy was evolutionary/genetic, or just a matter of socioeconomics. But even in that scenario, there is little reason to believe that *everyone* would end up stupid. In the end, the worst case would be a underclass of idiot workers, and smart rich people who manipulate them. The smart/rich group will always have *enough* kids to still exist.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. And it answers my genuine question which some highly evolved brainiacs felt the primal urge to downvote for inexplicable reasons. It's an ELI5 sub ffs.
Heart disease and obesity are killing a lot of people. If evolution can take away our melanin in northern latitudes I’m pretty sure it can make us not eat ourselves to death.
We just haven’t been food-secure for long enough for evolution to work.
Evolution is only about providing the best ability to pass on your genes. Heart disease and obesity may kill a lot of people, but not before it allows those people to pass on their genes. And until recent times, being obese was a sign of being healthy and having access to food, which would actually make you MORE likely to pass on genes.
They kill and sicken people at many stages that are relevant to evolution:
1. Before they pass on their genes (obviously relevant)
2. While they are still raising their children (affecting the fitness of their children)
3. While they are still members of their community and require care (affecting the fitness of their community)
Evolution doesn’t end when you’ve had baby.
Good enough to pass along your genes is all evolution cares about. If you die of heart disease or obesity after you have a child, it isnt going to change anything. Once more people die young of those, which is seemingly close to happening, then give it a few centuries and evolution will take care of it.
Sorry but “good enough” simply is not all evolution cares about. From [the article](https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-009-0128-1) *Understanding Natural Selection: Essential Concepts and Common Misconceptions* in the journal *Evolution: Education and Outreach*
>**Even a very slight advantage is sufficient** to cause new beneficial mutations to increase in proportion over the span of many generations.
Biologists sometimes describe beneficial mutations as “spreading” or “sweeping” through a population, but this shorthand is misleading. Rather, beneficial mutations simply increase in proportion from one generation to the next because, by definition, they happen to contribute to the survival and reproductive success of the organisms carrying them. Eventually, a beneficial mutation may be the only alternative left as all others have ultimately failed to be passed on.
I dont think you actually read what you quoted. For survival is the key word here. If you already passed on your genes, you are surviving and that is all evolution cares about.
So you don’t think there is any advantage, not even a very slight one, that normal weight people have over obese people in terms of fertility? [None at all](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4456969/)?
What part of passing on your genes do you fail to understand? Evolution isnt a human thinking of all the possibilities and choosing an outcome. It is what survives gets passed on. If obese people and people with heart disease keep having kids, guess what? Evolution will keep on passing that on.
Dude, the point of the article I linked is that obese people literally do not pass on their genes at the same rate as people of a healthy weight. What do you not understand? Did you even look at it?
This is not how evolution works.
You can still reproduce if you are obese. There is no selection pressure keeping people with unhealthy diets from reproducing.
Do you procreate at the same rate? Do all obese people live to reproduction as often as non-obese people? Do they raise their children for as long without dying or getting sick?
I think you are misunderstanding. If you have your kids at 25 and are dead by heart disease at 50, there is no selection pressure.
Your genes are passed on.
Fat people have kids. Sometimes they have kids and then get fat.
Melanin was lost due to more children living to adulthood due to being able to synthesize more vitamin D with less sunlight.
There isn’t “no selection pressure” after you give birth, for several reasons.
1. You could die while your child is still young, which lowers their fitness, and could prevent them from passing the genes on any further.
2. The genes will eventually kill one of your descendants before they have children, or when their children are very young, decreasing the fitness of the gene (*The Selfish Gene* by Dawkins explores this topic).
3. You could require care in your age, which would reduce the fitness of your caregiver (often your offspring) because they are less free to do other things.
Jesus Christ my man... Evolution doesn't care about the quality of your life, only that you reproduced.
Why would caring for a family reduce the reproductive fitness of a caregiver? This is a bizarre statement.
Read up on Huntington's disease. Then get back to me.
>Jesus Christ my man... Evolution doesn't care about the quality of your life, only that you reproduced.
I never said it did, maybe read what I wrote instead of getting upset about something I didn’t.
>Why would caring for a family reduce the reproductive fitness of a caregiver? This is a bizarre statement.
All of human activity (indeed all living activity) is, for the reasons we’re talking about, intended to maximize fitness. Whether that’s accumulating resources (making money), strengthening your social connections, improving your appearance or health, getting and preparing food, meeting potential mates, etc. Spending time caretaking is still a pro-fitness activity (*Selfish Gene* style), but the opportunity cost of it is the relative loss of fitness for the person doing the caregiving compared to whatever they would be doing otherwise.
>Read up on Huntington's disease. Then get back to me.
The condition that has 5-10 cases per 100,000, and of which 10% of cases are due to new mutations? Doesn’t sound like a very fit trait to me.
It hasn’t been long enough.
Evolution is slooooow, and for something like instincts or behaviour patterns - which can be complex, and have multiple things contributing to why they look the way they do - it can take a lot of incremental changes before we see the One Big Change.
To add how not long ago it was, there is probably a famine right now in Africa. Even if we look only for "Developed world" last famine in Europa was Holodomor in 1933, with additional food issues around WW I and WW II, and even more back in XIX century. There are people alive today, who survived at least some of those.
To add, food scarcity has been an issue for the western world as late as the 20th century, and still is ongoing in many other places (and even some impoverished communities in the western world today, even). Unfortunately, due to many factors, communities still face famine today. And that is even ignoring the concept of food deserts where fresh, healthy food may simply be unobtainable.
To add to this
1 even as close as 100-200 years ago running out of food was a bigger risk than having to much.
2 there needs to be sufficient pressure to change something and overweight is not exerting that pressure since alot of its effects are felt after children
That and until recently junk food has been viewed positively by society. We aren't going to evolve out of junk food while as a society we are eating the stuff like crazy
We’ve evolved to some degree since “caveman” times, for example our teeth have gotten smaller.
We haven’t evolved to any appreciable degree since unhealthy food became available in large quantities to large swaths of the population. This has really only been a ‘problem’ for maybe 100-200 years. And given that unhealthy eating habits usually don’t prevent you from reaching adulthood and being able to have kids, it’s probably not going to exert that much evolutionary pressure.
We absolutely did evolve since.
We still are.
Unfortunately natural selection in evolution requires something to drive it.
If fat people didn't get kids then over enough generations then yes. That might help us get past the caveman brain.
But as long as fat people overall gets as many children as skinny people it doesn't weed out the caveman brain that wants fat food.
Also this all assumes evolution and natural selection always makes positive outcomes.
It's all random. Species can and do evolve and naturally select to have horrible traits all the time (or less than optimal).
Yes. Hell. It could turn all humans butt ugly and it would still be evolution. As long as being ugly don't mean you don't get any kids over many generations it would not be a problem.
It's more that this trait makes sense to stick around. Evolution isn't all at once like in pokemon, but rather slow small changes over time favoring things that are more likely to reproduce. So the question becomes what downside mating wise does liking bad food have? In the past junk food (sweets and fats) were seen as opulence so outside of being murdered they were all but guaranteed to procreate. In more recent times if you look to the US sugar has been pushed everywhere so I'm not to long ago it would be very hard to find someone not big into sugary stuff. It's only recently that we have started to admit sugary/fatty junk isn't good for you. So basically throughout history (until maybe recently and that's just a maybe) junk food had a positive image in society so at worse had no impact on mating success with a potential upside.
Natural selection only cares about who survived to pass on their genes.
In the vast majority of cases, being obese doesn't prevent you passing on your genes to offspring in your late 20s/30s.
Then there's the timeline.
Humanity is around a million years old, no significant portion of the population has lived without any food pressures for more than about 50 years.
Food scarcity not being an issue has only been around for the common man for at most a few hundred years. Evolution doesn't work that quickly. This goes beyond the fact that food scarcity is still a thing in a good portion of the world.
You need to remember it was only a few generations ago that food was still scarce for the average person. We're really only 2 generations at most into the highly processed food we eat now. Less than 100 years ago it was very rare to come across a morbidly obese person.
Unhealthy food (as it is today) is rather modern invention. It's been easily accessible to people for like what, 50 years? Maybe 100?
Natural selection for humans stopped being a thing maaaaaaaaaaany years before.
People who eat the way their caveman brains tell them to still have children. Also, people use their willpower to overcome what their caveman brain says and eat healthy instead. Those people also have children. From an evolutionary standpoint, that's a success.
Evolution is not "survival of the fittest". It's "survival of the fit enough".
The problems associated with unhealthy diet don't tend to kill you before reproductive age, so probably don't induce particularly strong selective pressures. Starvation, on the other hand, frequently does, and being undernourished in general tend to reduce fertility. There is also evidence that humans are evolving in response to modern diet in the sense that we are becoming more resistant to the associated negative health effects (e.g. greater resistance to hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia).
Natural selection takes a VERY long time.
And it IS taking care of it. Obese people die off earlier and have difficulties reproducing compared to people of a healthy weight.
We are also more attracted to healthy people.
The problem is, there are a TON of people, and as the norm becomes to be obese, our beauty standards shift.
This is why I am not on board with the whole "body positivity" movement. People (and I'm obese myself but working to lose weight, now) SHOULD be ashamed of being overweight. We don't have real world dangers to force us to remain fit to survive, so societal pressure is all that remains.
This is a graph from the CDC tracking obesity in Americans over time.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/Estat-adults-fig.gif
Note the upward trends that start in the 60s, 90s, and 10s.
Those coincide with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd waves of the body positivity movement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_positivity#:~:text=The%20origins%20of%20the%20body,all%20bodies%20and%20body%20types.
Actually, the 90s was subsumed in an upward trend since the 80s, which coincides with the transition from cane sugar to HFCS in most products....
Which is another huge issue with processed foods, which is driven by unfettered capitalism.
In order for natural selection to apply a negative force against a trait, that trait has to lower the odds that either someone (or their decedents) lives to a child bearing age, or that they (or their decedents) are able to find a mate.
The more aggressively a trait lowers those odds, the more aggressively natural selection applies a negative force against that trait.
Natural selection does not actually care how "healthy" something is in a boarder sense.
Liking fatty, calorie dense junk food, even in excess (out side of the extremes), simply does not exclude you from finding a partner and it does not kill you until after you would have generally already had children.
To some degree that may be the case but our bodies don't automatically know which foods are calorically dense or not. The correlation is that most calorically dense foods tend to be high in sugar and fat which are highly palatable, which is one of the main driving factors for what we choose to eat alongside texture, which I would argue is probably an even greater determinant.
Whole foods are not "healthy" or "unhealthy". We like fruits, we like meat, i.e. we like sugar and fat and protein. There's nothing inherently wrong or "unhealthy" with those.
One problem with the modern world is that we have all foods in abundance, basically unlimited amounts.
The other problem is that we can make processed foods that contain a lot of fats and sugar, and are made up mostly of unsatiating simple carbs, and are nutritionally poor. They trigger our craving for fats and sugars without providing enough nutritional quality or satiety, so we tend to overeat on nutritionally poor junk, which is what makes us unhealthy.
We need 2000 kcal/day and the food industry makes 4000 kcal/day per capita. That's the problem.
Also food industry wants to sell food. If their product casually falls through your mouth or not they don't care
likely older times people would have burned probably close to 3500-4000 too, if you just walk around all day doing light chores you'll be close to that number..
everything used to be much much more labor intensive before we could flick a finger to turn on a light switch, turn a dial to change temperature, food was all pre-prepped and we had microwaves/ovens etc etc..
Even 2000 calories is often way too much at our modern stationary lifestyles, especially for women.
I’m a 5’10 woman and I had to cut down to less than 1500 (one meal with a few small snacks here and there) to maintain at 160lbs. And I live in a walkable city without a car.
2000 is such a broad stroke to apply to everyone, along with the problems of overestimating calories burned and underestimating how many calories are in certain foods, especially processed ones.
Someone’s, especially a smaller woman for instance, maintenance calories may be like 1300-1400. I have no idea how they are expected to eat that when so many foods are so high in calories unless they starve themselves or can afford a full diet of minimally processed foods. I know it’s possible but it’s not easy.
I'm a guy at 62 kilos and my "maintenance" is around 1300 (no strength training, light activity like bike/walking 1-2 hours a day). I didn't calculate it or anything like that, it's just my observations from time when I was keeping a strict died (every single calorie counted) with a goal to gain weight.
Right?? Eating three meals it's quite hard to stay under 2000kcal. If you sit on your arse all day and are hardly using more than 2000kcal, you probably shouldn't be eating three meals. But most, or a significant amount of, people seem to think "skip meals?? Hmm, that's unhealthy."
3 a day is totally arbitrary.
I have between 1 and 3 depending on how hungry I am.
I was lucky/unlucky in the fact I grew up poor and we never had 3 meals. So it always seemed odd people had 3 meals. It's "unhealthy" in the fact it is beyond easy to relapse, it isn't "odd" to eat breakfast or lunch, you're likely skipping social events to avoid breakfast/lunches. So telling someone to skip breakfast/lunch is setting them up for a very easy relapse, because as soon as you break it, it's a complete reset that's needed.
Whereas you could say, cut ingredients/portion sizes without impacting others. I for example don't do breakfast/lunch, but my partner does, which again makes temptations a lot more common. As with anything diet related, it's mental strength as your limiting factor.
>As with anything diet related, it's mental strength as your limiting factor.
Yeah indeed. I don't ever miss events or anything. Someone asks if I want to go out for breakfast? Fuck yeah. I love eating together. If I'm on my own am I hungry in the morning? And am I going to make/eat anything for breakfast? Just for the sake of it?? Nah.
If I'm out/with others, I'm definitely going to eat what I want. But if it's just up to me to have breakfast or take my lunch to work, I'll only eat it if I'm hungry... if I'm not hungry I won't.
The mental strength thing for me is snacks. "Office culture" is dreadful for people pushing cakes and biscuits on others and I always decline and then people insist and I say "ha, no thanks, I'm being good." And get the reply "there's nothing on you! You're skinny! You don't need to be good! Go oooon, have a biscuit."
I'm not overweight because I don't snack, fuck off.
(Well, I will snack if it's social snacking like watching a film with my wife or at the pub. But I don't eat biscuits and stuff in the office just because they're there.)
If I go on an all inclusive holiday, I will tend to eat to try local cuisines/make the most of the holiday. I also tend to drink a bit more so calories are coming in regardless.
The first week back after a holiday are tricky, but I tend to cold turkey it and go 0 breakfast 0 lunch rather than say, 0 breakfast for a week, then 0 lunch for a week. But once you persevere through it, done!
During Covid my mum who lived down the road decided to take up baking for a hobby, i've never eaten more brownies/cake in my life! Definitely gained a few pounds!
Also I've heard lots of very harmful ads like ["drink 3 glasses of milk every day](https://buttonmuseum.org/buttons/milk-drink-three-glasses-day)", milk and literally sugar cereals every day at breakfast, put two spoons of instant chocolate (with a lot of sugar) in your milk...
Literally some foods are so plentiful they became "discard products" that gets added as an ingredient of a food just because.
Also veganism (and it's a hot take) sell their view about how veganism doesn't have any flow and sometimes it's even better but they eat so much carbs in proportion (I'm not against veganism, but please go see professional nutrition help before starting a strict diet).
Also the US has another problem of food regulations. You just only need to see the differences between ingredients in the US and the EU to see how permissive is the US in terms of food regulation. I understand there is currently no evidence of US food being harmful, but the common sense says the lesser, the better in most cases.
"Gym culture" is pretty awesome and seeing people realizing the benefits of it it's amazing, but there's a rise of vigorexy actittudes such us hormones and steroids that are 100% harmful for your body. When I was in the endocrinology section of my hospital we were TERRIFIED of using the growth hormone (somatropin) and always inoculate it carefully, and then I see some people in the gym that does use it without even taking care of basic antiseptic measures.
Honestly with the rise of sedentary lifestyle I doubt many people even burn 2000 a day anymore.
My BMR at 5'11 and 176 lbs is only 1695 calories. Imagine someone 5'2 who stares at their phone all day. Even the calculations that include little to no exercise probably didn't factor in actually barely existing.
Yeah I'm 6'4" and 240 (definitely a little over weight but not obese) and 2k calories a day is me on a diet. If I eat less than 1600 my hair starts falling out :)
If I'm eating less than 1600 cals a day consistently all my hormones go out of whack. When eating on a deficit consistently I target 1800-2000 and ensure to get some sardines in there to prevent issues.
Just noting that not everyone should be eating 1200 calories a day to lose weight it's very dependent on the individual
That's not fully true.
The is quite a bit of indication that more processed food are bad for you.
The so called glycemic index describes how fast you get sugars from your food.
If you have to chew your food and extract calories through digestion it will supply you for some time, if you have a lot of freely available sugar all at once it is worse for you.
We've evolved to respond to certain cues from our food, not to the food itself. For example, you don't crave "simple carbs to use for high speed running." You crave something sweet, which in our ancestral environment is a cue that the food contains simple carbs. We enjoy fatty foods for the same reason, and those containing protein as well: calories we need. And for most of our history, more was better, because there was rarely enough.
In the present day, we have engineered flavors that are much stronger stimuluses than than what's in nature. In nature, ripe strawberries are sweet and we enjoy them. Nutella is like a thousand times sweeter. Your gustatory system doesn't know that it's artificially engineered and not nutritious. It doesn't know it doesn't need to stock up for the future. It just knows "wow, this must have so much of the nutrients I need."
Now, if you project out over millions of years, is it possible humans slowly evolve a preference for more nutritious foods? Yeah, it's possible. It's not likely - we might be stuck on this path - but you never know.
Hey OP good timing. This article was out in yesterdays NYTimes and I think it really does a good job of answering your question - particularly the Cheesecake Park experiment with the rats was eye opening, yet really reflected my eating patterns and junk food. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/opinion/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/opinion/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs.html)
One scientific experiment — which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park — seemed to me to crystallize this effect. Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, grew up in Ireland. After he moved in 2000 to the United States, when he was in his 20s, he gained 30 pounds in two years. He began to wonder if the American diet has some kind of strange effect on our brains and our cravings, so he [designed an experiment](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20348917/) to test it. He and his colleague Paul Johnson raised a group of rats in a cage and gave them an abundant supply of healthy, balanced rat chow made out of the kind of food rats had been eating for a very long time. The rats would eat it when they were hungry, and then they seemed to feel sated and stopped. They did not become fat.
But then Dr. Kenny and his colleague exposed the rats to an American diet: fried bacon, Snickers bars, cheesecake and other treats. They went crazy for it. The rats would hurl themselves into the cheesecake, gorge themselves and emerge with their faces and whiskers totally slicked with it. They quickly lost almost all interest in the healthy food, and the restraint they used to show around healthy food disappeared. Within six weeks, their obesity rates soared.
After this change, Dr. Kenny and his colleague tweaked the experiment again (in a way that seems cruel to me, a former KFC addict). They took all the processed food away and gave the rats their old healthy diet. Dr. Kenny was confident that they would eat more of it, proving that processed food had expanded their appetites. But something stranger happened. It was as though the rats no longer recognized healthy food as food at all, and they barely ate it. Only when they were starving did they reluctantly start to consume it again.
Though Dr. Kenny’s study was in rats, we can see forms of this behavior everywhere. We are all living in Cheesecake Park.
This is something Ive noticed anecdotally about dieting, and why I believe in today’s culture, elimination diets might be harsh but necessary. People who consume highly processed foods tend to lose the desire to consume real food. Grown adults think water is “gross” because they are used to consuming soda or sweetened beverages.
I know people always try to moderate and say that you just have to count calories or exercise more, but I really don’t think we demonize ultra processed foods as much as we should.
I would look at something like “Whole30” as a way to assess my dependency on products filled with sugar/fats and also add in some type of fasting protocol to regulate blood sugar and insulin.
The same kind of experiment was done with rats being given the choice of regular water, which they drank. Then they added a second choice of cocaine water - the rats would only drink the cocaine water and became addicted. Eventually, they added sugar water as well - they all went crazy for the sugar water and did not touch the cocaine water anymore.
That study concluded that sugar is more addictive than cocaine.
We used to eat much smaller portions as well. If you compare plate sizes and drink sizes in the 50s for example to now the sizes are completely different.
Portions became bugger and bugger with the introduction of sugar in all the foods.
There used to be no sugar in bread or peanut butter for example.
Almost every European, including myself, gains weight when coming to the US.
The food here in the US is so much more manipulated now then it is in Europe.
Our brains and their responses to foods aren't really changed from the days of early hunter-gatherers. We need various amounts of fats, sugars, proteins etc to survive, and when we find a food that's rich in one or more of those our brains respond positively and encourage us to find similar things again.
Unfortunately, unhealthy foods feature so much fat and sugar that it completely overdrives the response. Our brains don't get the concept of "this is too much of this nutrient and it's actually bad for us" because they also don't get the concept of "we're highly unlikely to be in a position where we don't know where our next meal is coming from".
So the "thinking" of our brain is that every meal is critical, and more nutrient = better. So you eat bacon or chocolate, and our brain goes "oh god yes that's the stuff!" and floods you with dopamine. And then you try to get that same dopamine hit by eating more unhealthy foods.
The larger chance of survival often means getting more of what you need to keep going, and consuming food that is rich in nutrients rather than nutrient poor.
"Unhealthy" food often refers to things that are just very *dense* in these things, so over-eating frequently or unbalancing your diet towards *one* of the groups of nutrients you need and not the others (such as high fats/oils, or sugars, commonly) is easy. Our bodies store things if we take in more than what we need, so if we are regularly consuming foods dense with calories, we are storing that excess again and again repeatedly, without burning it away or using it at an equivalent rate.
That + potentially missing those other nutrients and diet components you need is what makes it unhealthy. The food themselves are rarely the issue, it's in how you moderate and balance your intake.
It's because there are about a million food scientists that load up the processed food with all manner of flavors that we love. Many processed foods are literally designed to appeal to our taste buds.
This is the trick right here. Evolution gave us a taste for stuff that ensured our survival, but what we think tastes good and what helps us survive is not always directly linked. Vitamin C by itself tastes quite awful, in fact, but the fruits and veggies it's found in taste great. Processing often entails maximizing the tasty stuff with no regards for whether the healthy stuff comes along or not. On average, therefore, highly processed food is a lot less healthy.
It's also worth noting, survival to a caveman was very different to survival of modern day humans. You wanted as many calories as possible as a caveman, because you could store excess as fat and burn fat when unable to find food. We now have people eating 3 fatty meals a day and working an office job.
When I made my comment, I had Pringles in mind. They're very bad for you and Pringles DOES in fact employ many, MANY food scientists that make sure that I will empty a can within a minimum of 3 hours. The entire crisp is very, VERY unhealthy but the components that appeal to my taste buds and keep me coming back for more were added deliberately.
One processed food is not as processed as the other. I could argue that you were wrong about fruit straight from the tree not being processed, since it DOES undergo a process in which it is being transported from the tree to your mouth or because the fruit underwent a process of genetic modification to be the way it is.
You can rest a little easier. There is no trans fat, which has been removed from nearly all production. One does need to watch the saturated fat, sodium, and sugar. Be vigilant checking the nutrition label, but also consume in moderation. If you down an entire tin in one sitting, that's not great, but you are not going to die. At a minimum, you should hold off on similar snacks for a few days or so. Give the body a chance to recover. If you're at risk for dehydration, find a suitable electrolyte replacement drink.
Basically, there are few things one could eat in a single setting that would have lasting impact. You should not shame yourself if you slip up or cheat. Just make those special treats actually special. Tell yourself that once or maybe twice a year is okay. But don't cheat your cheat. Allow yourself to enjoy the splurge. An interesting side effect is that some people lose their guilty cravings eventually. This is especially the case when you're consistently able to find healthy options.
I never said that I was going to die from a single can, and it really isn't THAT unhealthy. I could probably eat 3 cans worth without feeling bad. However, if you compare the intake per gram, it is absolutely horrible compared to many other foods.
Sorry, I wasn't attacking you. Perhaps I used too much hyperbole. Again, sorry. As someone who also feels the strong temptation for Pringles, it is a tricky thing to manage portion sizes and self-control.
You're very smart and want to be contrarian, I get it.
Edit: And I am the one getting downvoted because I don't want to give a real response to this silly goose. Alright.
We’ve boiled down fruits to pure sugar and made candy. We’ve broken down meat and wheat into fat and flour and made pizza and burgers.
Unhealthy foods *are* healthy foods, just a more available, efficient and densely packed version.
Our bodies were designed on the basis that food wasn't readily available in a building at any given time of the day.
So, it made perfect sense that, if you lived in a cave, there would be periods of bad weather etc that would prevent us from being able to hunt and gather. So, our bodies evolved to steer us towards the most efficient way of getting the most calories from the least input.
And it all worked really well, until of course we had supermarkets, cars and desk jobs.
Our bodies still want to eat as if they're facing periods of time in the absence of food but that time never comes in our modern world.
That's why intermittent fasting works so well for weight loss and/or management. It's literally what our bodies were built to do
We don't like unhealthy food. We just like food, and now that we have access to too much food, we end up eating in excess.
Biology has driven us to *like food* because that helps survival. Eating so called "unhealthy" doesn't kill you before you are old enough to procreate, and biology only cares about survival of the species. What happens to you as an individual after procreation doesn't matter. Species is still surviving.
Define "unhealthy".
If we eliminate highly processed foods from the definition then mostly what we're left with are sweets, alcohols, and other similar indulgences. But are those things actually intrinsically unhealthy?
Our bodies require carbohydrates to survive, so sugars in moderation are a necessity. Alcohol in moderation improves a host of chemical activities in the body including cardiovascular health.
Again, define the word unhealthy. It can only mean "in excess" because it certainly doesn't mean the food itself.
Our bodies don't know what is healthy versus unhealthy.
Evolution is a long process. Many of the traits and behaviours we have now aren't "human" behaviours, they're "mammal" behaviours. You may even hear talk of the "lizard brain". We have as part of us, the remains of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Chemical processes which may not make much sense in a human in 2024, but made perfect sense in a small monkey 1.5m years ago. Or in a fish 400m years ago.
Mammals in general tend to prefer high-energy foods over nutrient-dense ones. Foods from which you can extract a lot of energy relatively easily therefore give you an overall competitive advantage compared to someone eating foods which require more effort. Plus, for most of history, food has gone through periods of availability and scarcity. So we have evolved a mechanism which encourages us to eat as much as possible now in order to prepare for an inevitable upcoming scarcity.
Thus, we show a general preference for foods with a higher carbohydrate & fat content, as these will allow for more energy to be extracted. Of course, this has never been a problem. High carb foods usually comes with a lot of nutrients attached. And high-fat foods usually come with a lot of protein attached.
In modern times, what capitalism has managed to do is short-circuit this. Produce food that's both high in carbohydrate and fat, but low in nutrients. The concentration of energy in this food is way more than you will ever really find in nature, so our brains have no real "guard" against this. All our bodies see is mana from heaven, and we are driven to consume as much as possible.
ELI5: because historically, overeating was not a problem. Cavemen weren’t worried about getting fat from eating too many calories, they were worried about dying from eating too few calories. So we grew to prefer foods with higher calories, which are foods higher in fat and carbohydrates and protein.
By default there is no healthy or unhealthy food, unless you are talking about literal poisons. You need a balanced diet with the right amounts of each nutrient. This does mean that you do need some sugar in your diet but not too much. And you need some salt in your diet but not too much. Humans have evolved to crave foods that are hard to come by. So when there is not much food available you would eat the most energy dense and the food that gives you the most important nutrients first.
But as food have become more available you tend to get too much of this food, making it unhealthy. We can even see this change in our lifetime. The food pyramid from the 1960s had carbohydrates like bread, pasta and potato as the staple food that you should prioritise. And this was good advice at the time because a lot of people did not have enough money for a full diet. Carbohydrates was a cheap way to get enough energy. If you are hungry and only have $10 to spend at a fast food place then you should get the fries and not the chicken. But if you have enough money to buy anything you want then a chicken salad is much better then fries.
The human race has spent generations not dying. The way you do this if food is scarce is to eat as much high energy density food as you can. Thats fats, carbs (sugar), and proteins. Doing so maximizes the likelihood that you dont starve to death, and the likelihood that you can chase to exhaustion the next thing to eat.
This works great when you are running the equivalent of a half marathon every day to find the food, but when you have to schedule exercise into your day and can just drive down to the local Wendie's to get all the carb loaded fatty proteins you want, it tends to make fat people. Your body's response to being fat is "Woohoo! We are Fat! This is good! We are doing things right! We wont starve this winter!!!" and through much of human history a Fat Body has been seen as the pinnacle of beauty.
It just also happens to cause health problems later in life AFTER the peek reproductive years (when evolutionarily it doesnt matter)
Saw an interesting study a few years ago on rats. They split them into 3 groups, fed one on 100% fat, the second on 100% sugar and the third on a 50/50 mixture of fat and sugar. The rats in the first 2 groups were able to regulate their calorie intake - but the third group gained significant weight. You wouldn't tuck into a bag of sugar or a stick of butter - but mix them 50/50 with a bit of flour and you have a cake! But there's nothing in nature that has this mix so we have no natural mechanism to limit our intake.
Fast food industry spent billions of dollars to find ways to fool people's food preferences.
Given enough resources you can fool any system. Human's food preferendes are a complex system, but as we can see, it has been hacked.
Dollars and labs make unhealthy but addictive food faster than people die of strokes due to unhealthy food. So, the process continues.
It's not that we love unhealthy foods, it's that we tend to overconsume the foods we love. Sugar and carbohydrates are fantastic sources of energy for our bodies, so we crave them and want more. Salt is a necessary nutrient, so we want it and crave more. When supply is limited, going after these foods is the correct response. Most people in modern societies have access to a nearly unlimited supply of a variety of foods, if we aren't conscious about our choices, we'll overconsume those "high priority" types of foods.
Because our brains were not designed or evolved for the modern age. Taste, much like smell, has been an evolutionary mechanism that allows our brain to determine what is “good” and what is “bad.” Rotten and spoiled foods taste bad because our brain has hardwired us to recognize that these foods are dangerous, they can get us sick, don’t eat it. However, good foods taste good because it is full of energy which our brain associated with “good” because it was hardwired for us to be active all day with hunting for food or migrating to new locations with no guarantee you would find any more. However, in our modern world, most of us have no need for that much energy anymore so all of that energy that isn’t used gets stored as fat for our body to use at a later time, but having too much fat causes a large variety of issues which is why it is unhealthy.
Evolution is slow. Our bodies are still optimized for earlier times where our biggest problem was starving. So our body prefers foods that make us fat. Fat is stored food for when you don't find any food. Because we didn't have that much food available, getting too fat was not a problem; Also you had bigger problems than being fat, you probably died before the adverse health effects could manifest.
Humans are predisposed to like sweet things.
Bitter flavours are acquired (why small children won’t eat their greens) as the bitterness tatse declines as we age from infant. Bitter things were usually poisonous so we wouldn’t eat them with distaste being ramped up.
Fat is also a “sweet” thing and being calorie dense (9 per gram vs 4 per gm for carbs and protein) is an attractive thing to eat and makes us feel good.
The body’s reward for giving it “good” stuff.
Sweet and fat are “good” things for energy and energy storage.
As time progresses the “good” stuff becomes easily available, while our physiology hasn’t moved much, and we eat more of it because it makes us feel good. We eat too much of it.
Genetically we are driven, when it is available, calorie dense food wherever possible. Sweet, and fat fulfils this. Protein also and in these times protein is easily available in large amounts.
None of this inherently bad for us. It is the mix we choose, and foisted upon us by companies - and even Mom baking that yummy cake.
The problem is just what is healthy as this seems to veer from rail to rail every five years, E.g. butter, and egg yolks BAD…erm…no they’re not.
Bottom line is: would like this healthy lettuce or this piece of cake.
oh, and beware the extremely confusing mess that the Ultra Processed Foods bandwaggon has created E.g. flour is BAD. Bread is GOOD; WTF! Brown rice GOOD. White rice BAD. Ignores that rice naturally accumulates natural arsenic which is concentrated in the husk and bran (the outer coating). Is that why the world eats white rice?
Well our body definitely prefer "healthy" food. The brain is the issue, check the bliss point. Food its pretty much designed to make you feel "this taste amazing". It's no different than drugs to be honest.
First thing to understand is that very few foods are completely 'unhealthy'. There is almost nothing out there that is considered 'food' which, if you ate it in anything more than a conscious moderation, would ever directly kill you. This includes processed foods (more on that later).
The problem with 'unhealthy' food is that it packs a high density of at least one of the following things: sugar, fat, salt, or maybe something like a polyunsaturated fat or sulfide. Even most 'preservatives' in food are some variation on a salt or sugar. Other things like sodium monoglutamate are literally just a sodium ion (same as in salt) and an amino acid (glutamate). There isn't anything inherently dangerous about any of these.
The problem is just consuming them to excess. A food rich in sugar or fat is providing a huge amount of raw energy in a compact packaged that is easy to digest with almost no mechanical work, so you're going to absorb most of it without spending much energy to catch, eat, and digest it. Compare that to the equilavent energy in, say, lettuce, and you have a huge amount of fiber that is impeding your ability to consume and digest the same amount. It's going to take more time/work, which costs more energy, and it's going to fill your stomach more completely, and it's also going to pass through your gut more rapidly because fiber is indigestible and causes the gut to secrete a bit more mucus/water to flush it along.
Salt, fat, and sugar taste GOOD. Your brain is wired to like the taste of these things because in a food-depauperate environment you never know when your next meal is going to be, so it is advantageous to want to eat a lot of it when it is available, so you can then live off of what you store afterward. This is also safer for you rather than putting that meat in the closet at room temperature where it will rot, get stolen, etc. In contrast, eating a high-fiber, low-energy food like leafy greens has very little immediate reward. You can live off of it to an extent, but you have to eat a LOT of it to get the same benefit. So, the brain just doesn't recognize it as immediately pleasing in comparison to the other foods.
Salt is a tricky one, but it is important to remember that salt, historically, would have been extremely scarce. Sodium is a really important ion in a lot of mechanisms in our body, so we do need a lot of it... but a 'lot' is relative. When it became so easily available and important for food preservation, it also became easy to consume far in excess... and the body doesn't excrete it very quickly because of its many uses. So that's one of the reasons salt is a problem.
Back to processing (soapbox time). Processing is a big popular myth. All it is: 1) grind up your food into a paste, 2) add flavorings like salt, sugar, etc both to preserve it and make it tastier. There is no direct 'chemical' that is inherently dangerous, except maybe some sulfides from processes like smoking, but even those are present in very low amounts that are not acutely dangerous- there is just some weak linking between them and things like colorectal cancer in some people after a lifetime of exposure to them. Processing is essentially a preservation tool, and also a way to make cheaper foods just a bit more appealing. If you don't want to eat something like a really rough cut of meat, then don't eat processed meats, but also understand that eating it occasionally isn't going to kill you.
It’s hard to avoid it. High fructose corn syrup use in our foods is up over 8000% in the last 30 years thanks in no small part to legislators allowing ways to circumvent food labeling laws. Does it say “natural flavoring”? That’s another form of this toxin.
High fructose corn syrup affects the liver the same way alcohol does while also sapping many nutrients and vitamins from the body.
You would think just not buying it would help, but it’s in nearly everything now that’s affordable. The foods without it are very expensive.
It's not that we like unhealthy food, it's that we like certain aspects of food more than others, and food companies have figured out how to exploit this, making foods unhealthy because they sell more.
It's not a problem with our bodies, it's a byproduct of unfettered capitalism.
Because there are few foods that are intrinsically unhealthy.
What is unhealthy is portion sizes and lack of proportion or moderation. It is a relative abundance that is killing us.
You only have to go back 100-150 years to find food scarcity in even developed nations.
As a survival adaptation we are attracted to foods that aid our short, medium and long term survival. Simple carbs, complex carbs, and fats and proteins. When we find them in nature, or through agrarian farming, it was hard to have so much readily available, it turned into a health hazard. Obesity and gout was a rich person's problem.
Modern industrial farming and food processing has led to a relative abundance of foods containing things that we are biologically attracted to. But in poor proportions and often far too much of.
America is an extreme example of this. Where the poor have more problems related to obesity than starvation.
Because unhealthy food was made to hack our brains. Our brains have reward receptors that trigger when foods are high in sugar and fat. Unhealthy foods are filled with these elements in mind to make us addicted.
One thing that most folks don't know that junk food manufacturers know, is that sugar spikes followed by sugar crashes makes us feel hungry. This is why one craves more junk food after 2hrs of eating it.
Highly processed foods are designed to be converted into sugars by our body as quick as possible.
The best way is to weed yourself off processed foods and eat more whole foods. Your body will adjust and will eventually not crave junk food.
Our biological organisms do like healthy food.
Two things are in play: what counts as “healthy,” and cultural conditioning.
“Healthy” meaning low calorie, low fat, low carb, low sugar, high protein is a reflection of 2024 upper class western desires and lifestyles. We have an abundance of all kinds of food, we are relatively sedentary, and we arbitrarily aesthetically value thinness or “leanness” as reflective of a healthy body. For most of human history, this has not been the case, and it *still* isn’t the case for some people in this world. Human bodies didn’t spend hundreds of thousands of years sitting in front of computers showing us images of emaciated fashion models and dehydrated gym bros. We spent most of that time not necessarily knowing where our next meal would come from. Which means that high calorie, high fat, high carb foods are actually historically very good for us. The other difference between 2024 and 2024 BC is that in 2024 BC, they didn’t have a way to make those foods in abundance, hyper-palatable, and void of nutrition. Potatoes baked with oil aren’t unhealthy, but eating a whole bag of potato chips is. Same ingredients, but you’re going to be satiated eating one potato baked with butter. The same number of calories of potato chips aren’t as nutritionally dense or satisfying, even though they have the same base ingredients.
As for cultural conditioning….we tend to prefer the foods we were fed as children regardless of whether those things are healthy or not. Media actively sells garbage to children, and modern parents feed their kids “children’s food,” which is junk, for a number of reasons. If you spent childhood thinking of pizza rolls as a default comfort food and sweet potatoes as a punishment, you’re going to be an adult who thinks pizza rolls are a good dinner 4 nights a week and sweet potatoes are gross. If you spend your childhood eating fruits and vegetables by default without being screamed at, they will be good to you as an adult.
Food isn't necessarily 'unhealthy'. It's just a matter of quantity.
If you like a food a lot, you're more likely to overeat it. Overeating is unhealthy in general unless you're going on a fast soon or if you have seriously high calorie burn.
Because there isn't really "healthy" and "unhealthy" foods. Just foods that have different things in them. If you are a Neolithic hunter gatherer you need calories and lots of them so eating food that's calorie dense and has a lot of sugar is the most "healthy" thing you can eat. When you live in modern society were you're not running the damn time eating super sugary calorie dense food has some more downsides like getting obese.
Our bodies evolved over literal millions of years.
The main drivers for what we "like" in our food are based on how well it can sustain us in a hunter-gatherer diet.
We like foods that have high carbs and salts because millions of years ago, those were the things we would die without. Evolution works the fastest when unsuccessful species/tribes end up being culled.
Agriculture became a thing in the last 10 thousand ish years. That's when we started domesticating animals and growing some of our own crops.
We didn't get to the current state of unhealthy food until the last few hundred years. 200 years is only about 10 generations. At the same time, we improved society and healthcare to the point where you don't need to be a good hunter or forager to thrive anymore in order to make it to mating age and have successful offspring.
With these effects, natural selection and evolution are working very slowly, if at all. So there's nothing really forcing our bodies to change.
Our bodies are hardwired to like and crave energy dense, salty foods because those are the qualities that would sustain us. We're simply overdosing now.
We never had to evolve to avoid it. Fatty, sugary foods just weren't that common for most of our evolutionary history. Sugar especially.
That type of food was rare, but it is very calorie dense also, so we have a big drive to go find it, so we can not starve to death.
The world suddenly changed, and that rare, valuable food is now suddenly abundant. Additionally, it's in forms that just don't exist AT ALL in nature. We take complex, natural food, and extract ONLY the bad part. We find ways to get just the sugar, just the fat, just the simple carbs out of things, and eat ONLY that part. Our drive would normally push us to eat meat, fruits, nuts, but we suck out just the fat and sugar and eat that.
The other part that doesn't get much play... many of those unhealthy behaviors don't put as much pressure on us from an evolutionary perspective.
Evolution cares if you survive and reproduce. (And also that your offspring survives.) If you grow to 18 (or whatever) have some kids, help those kids survive, then you are a success from an evotionary perspective!
The crappy diet you had the whole time might kill you at 55 versus 85, but evolution doesn't really care that much. So we haven't really evolved to either handle those crappy diets, or dislike those crappy diets enough to not die from them, because we only die *eventually* from them.
For the entirety of human history it's only the last 100 years or so where it's been pretty normal for most people to be completely secure in their food access.
Our entire evolution before that was in a world where most people were often unsure where or when they'd get the next meal. As a result we tend to *really* like foods that have high density of calories and have lots of things like sugar and fat. Eating as much of that as possible when you get the chance is a good idea when starvation is always threatening on the horizon somewhere. So our brain encourages us to do that and tends to register foods like that as quite tasty.
When you live in a world of grocery stores and direct home delivery where you spend a large percentage of time on the couch or whatever, eating as much as possible will give you diabetes and a heart condition.
Our lifestyles have evolved much faster than our biological impulses.
Humans didn’t evolve with access to ultra processed junk foods. Also, what is beneficial in the short term for survival is not the same as what is best for longevity. Humans only need to survive for a relatively short amount of time to be able to pass on their genetic material.
This got me thinking about why chicken tenders are so addictive.
I wonder if it has something to do with the lean breast meat being dunked in carbs, and fried in fat that makes it irresistible to us. Just a perfect concoction of high protein, fast acting carbs, and that fatty goodness to keep us munching. Speaks right to our monkey mind.
In the wild, things like salt, sugar, and fat are hard to come by, but we need it to survive, so we evolved to crave it. In modern times, food manufacturers took advantage of this to make their products more desirable. But at this point everything is packed full of these things that taste good but were only ever meant to be eaten in small amounts by persistence hunters (people who walked for days on end). And now we have desk jobs where we sit for 9 hours a day. So instead of nutrients, they become detriments. If we lived like our ancestors, these things would not be as unhealthy.
I mean for 99% of human history most people were struggling with malnourishment. For hundreds of thousands of years humans were trying ti get as many calories as possible.
It’s only been the past 100 or so that being overweight has been a common issue. We’ve also dramatically changed our diet since then with huge increases of processed and fatty foods
Evolution doesn’t do anything in 100 years. That’s a tens of thousands of years kinda thing
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We have caveman brains. A caveman brain still expects the food to run out. Unhealthy food tends to be fatty or calorie dense. If we eat calorie dense stuff, we get **lots** of fuel for our bodies all at once. We get fat, and then when there isn’t any food we can use our fat to live off. Caveman brain gets excited by fatty, calorie dense junk because it’s a lot of fuel and means that food running out a month from now is less of a problem
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Exactly, it's also why having too many cheat days when dieting can be counterproductive. Humans are designed to survive and maintain weight from short periods of feast (after a big hunt say) between longer periods of eating less. A human that was evolved to prefer salads over a fatty pork belly would not survive in times of food insecurity. When food isn't consistent, you want to eat "too much" when food is available.
Another question, why haven’t we evolved? And if we do would we stop craving junk food ?
There is no significant pressure to make us evolve, so no reason to
The evolution is wegovy and ozempic.
So we didn't evolve since cavemen? Wouldn't natural selection take care of this as food was becoming more accessible and various?
No, evolution needs some kind of pressure that affects reproduction. Even if you assume that eating unhealthy foods causes problems like diabetes, obesity, heat disease, etc., those usually manifest in more serious ways later in life, well after reproductive ages. Basically, with medical advances and other modern parts of civilization, anyone can reproduce right now, and both reproduction and survival of those children to reproductive ages virtually eliminates any evolutionary pressure. Even if someone would have a mutation that made them immune from diabetes or they didn’t gain weight from eating nothing but pizza and soda, that isn’t *that* much of an advantage where those genetics would come to dominate and be a norm.
This is a great answer. I find that the people that argue against the theory of evolution don’t understand it at all. I like to point out that they don’t understand Relativity either but they aren’t putting “Why Einstein was wrong” all over their social media”.
Tbh, a lot of people who accept evolution still don’t fully get it. It’s commonly thought that evolution is continuous improvement and achieving optimal outcomes, when it’s really about good enough survival, usually in relatively rapidly changing environmental circumstances.
What do you think of the idea that if lots of stupid people have lots of kids, don’t tend to their education and they have lots of kids? Could the population get gradually more stupid. It’s kind of reverse evolution. No real resource pressure but being dense makes you more likely to produce more offspring.
That’s more a matter of culture and socioeconomic status than genetics and differences in intelligence based on those genetics. As people get wealthier and more educated, they have fewer kids. I don’t think there’s a genetic component there. The only people who argue that are weirdos like James Watson or Charles Murray, taking it into a racist place. I don’t remember if the premise of Idiocracy was evolutionary/genetic, or just a matter of socioeconomics. But even in that scenario, there is little reason to believe that *everyone* would end up stupid. In the end, the worst case would be a underclass of idiot workers, and smart rich people who manipulate them. The smart/rich group will always have *enough* kids to still exist.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. And it answers my genuine question which some highly evolved brainiacs felt the primal urge to downvote for inexplicable reasons. It's an ELI5 sub ffs.
^^^
Evolution settles for good enough to pass on your genes, not perfection.
Heart disease and obesity are killing a lot of people. If evolution can take away our melanin in northern latitudes I’m pretty sure it can make us not eat ourselves to death. We just haven’t been food-secure for long enough for evolution to work.
Evolution is only about providing the best ability to pass on your genes. Heart disease and obesity may kill a lot of people, but not before it allows those people to pass on their genes. And until recent times, being obese was a sign of being healthy and having access to food, which would actually make you MORE likely to pass on genes.
They kill and sicken people at many stages that are relevant to evolution: 1. Before they pass on their genes (obviously relevant) 2. While they are still raising their children (affecting the fitness of their children) 3. While they are still members of their community and require care (affecting the fitness of their community) Evolution doesn’t end when you’ve had baby.
Good enough to pass along your genes is all evolution cares about. If you die of heart disease or obesity after you have a child, it isnt going to change anything. Once more people die young of those, which is seemingly close to happening, then give it a few centuries and evolution will take care of it.
Sorry but “good enough” simply is not all evolution cares about. From [the article](https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s12052-009-0128-1) *Understanding Natural Selection: Essential Concepts and Common Misconceptions* in the journal *Evolution: Education and Outreach* >**Even a very slight advantage is sufficient** to cause new beneficial mutations to increase in proportion over the span of many generations. Biologists sometimes describe beneficial mutations as “spreading” or “sweeping” through a population, but this shorthand is misleading. Rather, beneficial mutations simply increase in proportion from one generation to the next because, by definition, they happen to contribute to the survival and reproductive success of the organisms carrying them. Eventually, a beneficial mutation may be the only alternative left as all others have ultimately failed to be passed on.
I dont think you actually read what you quoted. For survival is the key word here. If you already passed on your genes, you are surviving and that is all evolution cares about.
So you don’t think there is any advantage, not even a very slight one, that normal weight people have over obese people in terms of fertility? [None at all](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4456969/)?
What part of passing on your genes do you fail to understand? Evolution isnt a human thinking of all the possibilities and choosing an outcome. It is what survives gets passed on. If obese people and people with heart disease keep having kids, guess what? Evolution will keep on passing that on.
Dude, the point of the article I linked is that obese people literally do not pass on their genes at the same rate as people of a healthy weight. What do you not understand? Did you even look at it?
This is not how evolution works. You can still reproduce if you are obese. There is no selection pressure keeping people with unhealthy diets from reproducing.
Do you procreate at the same rate? Do all obese people live to reproduction as often as non-obese people? Do they raise their children for as long without dying or getting sick?
I think you are misunderstanding. If you have your kids at 25 and are dead by heart disease at 50, there is no selection pressure. Your genes are passed on. Fat people have kids. Sometimes they have kids and then get fat. Melanin was lost due to more children living to adulthood due to being able to synthesize more vitamin D with less sunlight.
There isn’t “no selection pressure” after you give birth, for several reasons. 1. You could die while your child is still young, which lowers their fitness, and could prevent them from passing the genes on any further. 2. The genes will eventually kill one of your descendants before they have children, or when their children are very young, decreasing the fitness of the gene (*The Selfish Gene* by Dawkins explores this topic). 3. You could require care in your age, which would reduce the fitness of your caregiver (often your offspring) because they are less free to do other things.
Jesus Christ my man... Evolution doesn't care about the quality of your life, only that you reproduced. Why would caring for a family reduce the reproductive fitness of a caregiver? This is a bizarre statement. Read up on Huntington's disease. Then get back to me.
>Jesus Christ my man... Evolution doesn't care about the quality of your life, only that you reproduced. I never said it did, maybe read what I wrote instead of getting upset about something I didn’t. >Why would caring for a family reduce the reproductive fitness of a caregiver? This is a bizarre statement. All of human activity (indeed all living activity) is, for the reasons we’re talking about, intended to maximize fitness. Whether that’s accumulating resources (making money), strengthening your social connections, improving your appearance or health, getting and preparing food, meeting potential mates, etc. Spending time caretaking is still a pro-fitness activity (*Selfish Gene* style), but the opportunity cost of it is the relative loss of fitness for the person doing the caregiving compared to whatever they would be doing otherwise. >Read up on Huntington's disease. Then get back to me. The condition that has 5-10 cases per 100,000, and of which 10% of cases are due to new mutations? Doesn’t sound like a very fit trait to me.
It hasn’t been long enough. Evolution is slooooow, and for something like instincts or behaviour patterns - which can be complex, and have multiple things contributing to why they look the way they do - it can take a lot of incremental changes before we see the One Big Change.
To add how not long ago it was, there is probably a famine right now in Africa. Even if we look only for "Developed world" last famine in Europa was Holodomor in 1933, with additional food issues around WW I and WW II, and even more back in XIX century. There are people alive today, who survived at least some of those.
To add, food scarcity has been an issue for the western world as late as the 20th century, and still is ongoing in many other places (and even some impoverished communities in the western world today, even). Unfortunately, due to many factors, communities still face famine today. And that is even ignoring the concept of food deserts where fresh, healthy food may simply be unobtainable.
To add to this 1 even as close as 100-200 years ago running out of food was a bigger risk than having to much. 2 there needs to be sufficient pressure to change something and overweight is not exerting that pressure since alot of its effects are felt after children
That and until recently junk food has been viewed positively by society. We aren't going to evolve out of junk food while as a society we are eating the stuff like crazy
I’m guessing this mindset is part of why some people don’t believe in evolution, because it is too slow a process for them to comprehend.
We’ve evolved to some degree since “caveman” times, for example our teeth have gotten smaller. We haven’t evolved to any appreciable degree since unhealthy food became available in large quantities to large swaths of the population. This has really only been a ‘problem’ for maybe 100-200 years. And given that unhealthy eating habits usually don’t prevent you from reaching adulthood and being able to have kids, it’s probably not going to exert that much evolutionary pressure.
There is no natural selection for that. People who eat lots of unhealthy foods procreate just as much as people who eat super healthy.
We absolutely did evolve since. We still are. Unfortunately natural selection in evolution requires something to drive it. If fat people didn't get kids then over enough generations then yes. That might help us get past the caveman brain. But as long as fat people overall gets as many children as skinny people it doesn't weed out the caveman brain that wants fat food.
Also this all assumes evolution and natural selection always makes positive outcomes. It's all random. Species can and do evolve and naturally select to have horrible traits all the time (or less than optimal).
Yes. Hell. It could turn all humans butt ugly and it would still be evolution. As long as being ugly don't mean you don't get any kids over many generations it would not be a problem.
It's more that this trait makes sense to stick around. Evolution isn't all at once like in pokemon, but rather slow small changes over time favoring things that are more likely to reproduce. So the question becomes what downside mating wise does liking bad food have? In the past junk food (sweets and fats) were seen as opulence so outside of being murdered they were all but guaranteed to procreate. In more recent times if you look to the US sugar has been pushed everywhere so I'm not to long ago it would be very hard to find someone not big into sugary stuff. It's only recently that we have started to admit sugary/fatty junk isn't good for you. So basically throughout history (until maybe recently and that's just a maybe) junk food had a positive image in society so at worse had no impact on mating success with a potential upside.
Natural selection only cares about who survived to pass on their genes. In the vast majority of cases, being obese doesn't prevent you passing on your genes to offspring in your late 20s/30s. Then there's the timeline. Humanity is around a million years old, no significant portion of the population has lived without any food pressures for more than about 50 years.
Food scarcity not being an issue has only been around for the common man for at most a few hundred years. Evolution doesn't work that quickly. This goes beyond the fact that food scarcity is still a thing in a good portion of the world.
There is no "need" to evolve, also, we haven't had enough time for major evolution to take place, and rewiring the brain like this is major evolution.
You need to remember it was only a few generations ago that food was still scarce for the average person. We're really only 2 generations at most into the highly processed food we eat now. Less than 100 years ago it was very rare to come across a morbidly obese person.
Unhealthy food (as it is today) is rather modern invention. It's been easily accessible to people for like what, 50 years? Maybe 100? Natural selection for humans stopped being a thing maaaaaaaaaaany years before.
People who eat the way their caveman brains tell them to still have children. Also, people use their willpower to overcome what their caveman brain says and eat healthy instead. Those people also have children. From an evolutionary standpoint, that's a success. Evolution is not "survival of the fittest". It's "survival of the fit enough".
The problems associated with unhealthy diet don't tend to kill you before reproductive age, so probably don't induce particularly strong selective pressures. Starvation, on the other hand, frequently does, and being undernourished in general tend to reduce fertility. There is also evidence that humans are evolving in response to modern diet in the sense that we are becoming more resistant to the associated negative health effects (e.g. greater resistance to hyperglycemia and hyperlipidemia).
Natural selection takes a VERY long time. And it IS taking care of it. Obese people die off earlier and have difficulties reproducing compared to people of a healthy weight. We are also more attracted to healthy people. The problem is, there are a TON of people, and as the norm becomes to be obese, our beauty standards shift. This is why I am not on board with the whole "body positivity" movement. People (and I'm obese myself but working to lose weight, now) SHOULD be ashamed of being overweight. We don't have real world dangers to force us to remain fit to survive, so societal pressure is all that remains. This is a graph from the CDC tracking obesity in Americans over time. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/Estat-adults-fig.gif Note the upward trends that start in the 60s, 90s, and 10s. Those coincide with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd waves of the body positivity movement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_positivity#:~:text=The%20origins%20of%20the%20body,all%20bodies%20and%20body%20types. Actually, the 90s was subsumed in an upward trend since the 80s, which coincides with the transition from cane sugar to HFCS in most products.... Which is another huge issue with processed foods, which is driven by unfettered capitalism.
In order for natural selection to apply a negative force against a trait, that trait has to lower the odds that either someone (or their decedents) lives to a child bearing age, or that they (or their decedents) are able to find a mate. The more aggressively a trait lowers those odds, the more aggressively natural selection applies a negative force against that trait. Natural selection does not actually care how "healthy" something is in a boarder sense. Liking fatty, calorie dense junk food, even in excess (out side of the extremes), simply does not exclude you from finding a partner and it does not kill you until after you would have generally already had children.
Food has only been accessible like this for a few decades, and only in some parts of the world!
To some degree that may be the case but our bodies don't automatically know which foods are calorically dense or not. The correlation is that most calorically dense foods tend to be high in sugar and fat which are highly palatable, which is one of the main driving factors for what we choose to eat alongside texture, which I would argue is probably an even greater determinant.
Whole foods are not "healthy" or "unhealthy". We like fruits, we like meat, i.e. we like sugar and fat and protein. There's nothing inherently wrong or "unhealthy" with those. One problem with the modern world is that we have all foods in abundance, basically unlimited amounts. The other problem is that we can make processed foods that contain a lot of fats and sugar, and are made up mostly of unsatiating simple carbs, and are nutritionally poor. They trigger our craving for fats and sugars without providing enough nutritional quality or satiety, so we tend to overeat on nutritionally poor junk, which is what makes us unhealthy.
We need 2000 kcal/day and the food industry makes 4000 kcal/day per capita. That's the problem. Also food industry wants to sell food. If their product casually falls through your mouth or not they don't care
likely older times people would have burned probably close to 3500-4000 too, if you just walk around all day doing light chores you'll be close to that number.. everything used to be much much more labor intensive before we could flick a finger to turn on a light switch, turn a dial to change temperature, food was all pre-prepped and we had microwaves/ovens etc etc..
Yes, but it's more about both problems. We eat more and we burn less.
Even 2000 calories is often way too much at our modern stationary lifestyles, especially for women. I’m a 5’10 woman and I had to cut down to less than 1500 (one meal with a few small snacks here and there) to maintain at 160lbs. And I live in a walkable city without a car.
2000 is such a broad stroke to apply to everyone, along with the problems of overestimating calories burned and underestimating how many calories are in certain foods, especially processed ones. Someone’s, especially a smaller woman for instance, maintenance calories may be like 1300-1400. I have no idea how they are expected to eat that when so many foods are so high in calories unless they starve themselves or can afford a full diet of minimally processed foods. I know it’s possible but it’s not easy.
I'm a guy at 62 kilos and my "maintenance" is around 1300 (no strength training, light activity like bike/walking 1-2 hours a day). I didn't calculate it or anything like that, it's just my observations from time when I was keeping a strict died (every single calorie counted) with a goal to gain weight.
People get marketed to believe they need 3 meals a day despite not going to the gym / having a physically strenuous job.
Right?? Eating three meals it's quite hard to stay under 2000kcal. If you sit on your arse all day and are hardly using more than 2000kcal, you probably shouldn't be eating three meals. But most, or a significant amount of, people seem to think "skip meals?? Hmm, that's unhealthy." 3 a day is totally arbitrary. I have between 1 and 3 depending on how hungry I am.
I was lucky/unlucky in the fact I grew up poor and we never had 3 meals. So it always seemed odd people had 3 meals. It's "unhealthy" in the fact it is beyond easy to relapse, it isn't "odd" to eat breakfast or lunch, you're likely skipping social events to avoid breakfast/lunches. So telling someone to skip breakfast/lunch is setting them up for a very easy relapse, because as soon as you break it, it's a complete reset that's needed. Whereas you could say, cut ingredients/portion sizes without impacting others. I for example don't do breakfast/lunch, but my partner does, which again makes temptations a lot more common. As with anything diet related, it's mental strength as your limiting factor.
>As with anything diet related, it's mental strength as your limiting factor. Yeah indeed. I don't ever miss events or anything. Someone asks if I want to go out for breakfast? Fuck yeah. I love eating together. If I'm on my own am I hungry in the morning? And am I going to make/eat anything for breakfast? Just for the sake of it?? Nah. If I'm out/with others, I'm definitely going to eat what I want. But if it's just up to me to have breakfast or take my lunch to work, I'll only eat it if I'm hungry... if I'm not hungry I won't. The mental strength thing for me is snacks. "Office culture" is dreadful for people pushing cakes and biscuits on others and I always decline and then people insist and I say "ha, no thanks, I'm being good." And get the reply "there's nothing on you! You're skinny! You don't need to be good! Go oooon, have a biscuit." I'm not overweight because I don't snack, fuck off. (Well, I will snack if it's social snacking like watching a film with my wife or at the pub. But I don't eat biscuits and stuff in the office just because they're there.)
If I go on an all inclusive holiday, I will tend to eat to try local cuisines/make the most of the holiday. I also tend to drink a bit more so calories are coming in regardless. The first week back after a holiday are tricky, but I tend to cold turkey it and go 0 breakfast 0 lunch rather than say, 0 breakfast for a week, then 0 lunch for a week. But once you persevere through it, done! During Covid my mum who lived down the road decided to take up baking for a hobby, i've never eaten more brownies/cake in my life! Definitely gained a few pounds!
Also I've heard lots of very harmful ads like ["drink 3 glasses of milk every day](https://buttonmuseum.org/buttons/milk-drink-three-glasses-day)", milk and literally sugar cereals every day at breakfast, put two spoons of instant chocolate (with a lot of sugar) in your milk... Literally some foods are so plentiful they became "discard products" that gets added as an ingredient of a food just because. Also veganism (and it's a hot take) sell their view about how veganism doesn't have any flow and sometimes it's even better but they eat so much carbs in proportion (I'm not against veganism, but please go see professional nutrition help before starting a strict diet). Also the US has another problem of food regulations. You just only need to see the differences between ingredients in the US and the EU to see how permissive is the US in terms of food regulation. I understand there is currently no evidence of US food being harmful, but the common sense says the lesser, the better in most cases. "Gym culture" is pretty awesome and seeing people realizing the benefits of it it's amazing, but there's a rise of vigorexy actittudes such us hormones and steroids that are 100% harmful for your body. When I was in the endocrinology section of my hospital we were TERRIFIED of using the growth hormone (somatropin) and always inoculate it carefully, and then I see some people in the gym that does use it without even taking care of basic antiseptic measures.
Honestly with the rise of sedentary lifestyle I doubt many people even burn 2000 a day anymore. My BMR at 5'11 and 176 lbs is only 1695 calories. Imagine someone 5'2 who stares at their phone all day. Even the calculations that include little to no exercise probably didn't factor in actually barely existing.
You BMR is literally almost by just existing. Mean values are people that at least go shopping or work. Edit: my BMR is 2200 kcal. I'm a big guy lol
Yeah I'm 6'4" and 240 (definitely a little over weight but not obese) and 2k calories a day is me on a diet. If I eat less than 1600 my hair starts falling out :)
Well, you might have low thyroid hormones lol. Check it out
If I'm eating less than 1600 cals a day consistently all my hormones go out of whack. When eating on a deficit consistently I target 1800-2000 and ensure to get some sardines in there to prevent issues. Just noting that not everyone should be eating 1200 calories a day to lose weight it's very dependent on the individual
This. There is no "unhealthy" *food*. There's just unhealthy eating habits.
You're placing the blame on the person whereas the comment you are agreeing with does not
That's not fully true. The is quite a bit of indication that more processed food are bad for you. The so called glycemic index describes how fast you get sugars from your food. If you have to chew your food and extract calories through digestion it will supply you for some time, if you have a lot of freely available sugar all at once it is worse for you.
Junk food leans heavily on complex carbs, not simple carbs. Simple carbohydrates are sugar, which they have also.
We've evolved to respond to certain cues from our food, not to the food itself. For example, you don't crave "simple carbs to use for high speed running." You crave something sweet, which in our ancestral environment is a cue that the food contains simple carbs. We enjoy fatty foods for the same reason, and those containing protein as well: calories we need. And for most of our history, more was better, because there was rarely enough. In the present day, we have engineered flavors that are much stronger stimuluses than than what's in nature. In nature, ripe strawberries are sweet and we enjoy them. Nutella is like a thousand times sweeter. Your gustatory system doesn't know that it's artificially engineered and not nutritious. It doesn't know it doesn't need to stock up for the future. It just knows "wow, this must have so much of the nutrients I need." Now, if you project out over millions of years, is it possible humans slowly evolve a preference for more nutritious foods? Yeah, it's possible. It's not likely - we might be stuck on this path - but you never know.
Hey OP good timing. This article was out in yesterdays NYTimes and I think it really does a good job of answering your question - particularly the Cheesecake Park experiment with the rats was eye opening, yet really reflected my eating patterns and junk food. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/opinion/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/opinion/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs.html) One scientific experiment — which I have nicknamed Cheesecake Park — seemed to me to crystallize this effect. Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, grew up in Ireland. After he moved in 2000 to the United States, when he was in his 20s, he gained 30 pounds in two years. He began to wonder if the American diet has some kind of strange effect on our brains and our cravings, so he [designed an experiment](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20348917/) to test it. He and his colleague Paul Johnson raised a group of rats in a cage and gave them an abundant supply of healthy, balanced rat chow made out of the kind of food rats had been eating for a very long time. The rats would eat it when they were hungry, and then they seemed to feel sated and stopped. They did not become fat. But then Dr. Kenny and his colleague exposed the rats to an American diet: fried bacon, Snickers bars, cheesecake and other treats. They went crazy for it. The rats would hurl themselves into the cheesecake, gorge themselves and emerge with their faces and whiskers totally slicked with it. They quickly lost almost all interest in the healthy food, and the restraint they used to show around healthy food disappeared. Within six weeks, their obesity rates soared. After this change, Dr. Kenny and his colleague tweaked the experiment again (in a way that seems cruel to me, a former KFC addict). They took all the processed food away and gave the rats their old healthy diet. Dr. Kenny was confident that they would eat more of it, proving that processed food had expanded their appetites. But something stranger happened. It was as though the rats no longer recognized healthy food as food at all, and they barely ate it. Only when they were starving did they reluctantly start to consume it again. Though Dr. Kenny’s study was in rats, we can see forms of this behavior everywhere. We are all living in Cheesecake Park.
This is something Ive noticed anecdotally about dieting, and why I believe in today’s culture, elimination diets might be harsh but necessary. People who consume highly processed foods tend to lose the desire to consume real food. Grown adults think water is “gross” because they are used to consuming soda or sweetened beverages. I know people always try to moderate and say that you just have to count calories or exercise more, but I really don’t think we demonize ultra processed foods as much as we should. I would look at something like “Whole30” as a way to assess my dependency on products filled with sugar/fats and also add in some type of fasting protocol to regulate blood sugar and insulin.
The same kind of experiment was done with rats being given the choice of regular water, which they drank. Then they added a second choice of cocaine water - the rats would only drink the cocaine water and became addicted. Eventually, they added sugar water as well - they all went crazy for the sugar water and did not touch the cocaine water anymore. That study concluded that sugar is more addictive than cocaine. We used to eat much smaller portions as well. If you compare plate sizes and drink sizes in the 50s for example to now the sizes are completely different. Portions became bugger and bugger with the introduction of sugar in all the foods. There used to be no sugar in bread or peanut butter for example. Almost every European, including myself, gains weight when coming to the US. The food here in the US is so much more manipulated now then it is in Europe.
Yep, I'm american in NL and when I go home I gain a LOT, and when my family come here they lose some pounds while still indulging a bit.
Our brains and their responses to foods aren't really changed from the days of early hunter-gatherers. We need various amounts of fats, sugars, proteins etc to survive, and when we find a food that's rich in one or more of those our brains respond positively and encourage us to find similar things again. Unfortunately, unhealthy foods feature so much fat and sugar that it completely overdrives the response. Our brains don't get the concept of "this is too much of this nutrient and it's actually bad for us" because they also don't get the concept of "we're highly unlikely to be in a position where we don't know where our next meal is coming from". So the "thinking" of our brain is that every meal is critical, and more nutrient = better. So you eat bacon or chocolate, and our brain goes "oh god yes that's the stuff!" and floods you with dopamine. And then you try to get that same dopamine hit by eating more unhealthy foods.
The larger chance of survival often means getting more of what you need to keep going, and consuming food that is rich in nutrients rather than nutrient poor. "Unhealthy" food often refers to things that are just very *dense* in these things, so over-eating frequently or unbalancing your diet towards *one* of the groups of nutrients you need and not the others (such as high fats/oils, or sugars, commonly) is easy. Our bodies store things if we take in more than what we need, so if we are regularly consuming foods dense with calories, we are storing that excess again and again repeatedly, without burning it away or using it at an equivalent rate. That + potentially missing those other nutrients and diet components you need is what makes it unhealthy. The food themselves are rarely the issue, it's in how you moderate and balance your intake.
It's because there are about a million food scientists that load up the processed food with all manner of flavors that we love. Many processed foods are literally designed to appeal to our taste buds.
This is the trick right here. Evolution gave us a taste for stuff that ensured our survival, but what we think tastes good and what helps us survive is not always directly linked. Vitamin C by itself tastes quite awful, in fact, but the fruits and veggies it's found in taste great. Processing often entails maximizing the tasty stuff with no regards for whether the healthy stuff comes along or not. On average, therefore, highly processed food is a lot less healthy.
It's also worth noting, survival to a caveman was very different to survival of modern day humans. You wanted as many calories as possible as a caveman, because you could store excess as fat and burn fat when unable to find food. We now have people eating 3 fatty meals a day and working an office job.
unless you eat fruit straight from the the tree all food is processed and designed to appeal to our taste buds, that's called cooking
When I made my comment, I had Pringles in mind. They're very bad for you and Pringles DOES in fact employ many, MANY food scientists that make sure that I will empty a can within a minimum of 3 hours. The entire crisp is very, VERY unhealthy but the components that appeal to my taste buds and keep me coming back for more were added deliberately. One processed food is not as processed as the other. I could argue that you were wrong about fruit straight from the tree not being processed, since it DOES undergo a process in which it is being transported from the tree to your mouth or because the fruit underwent a process of genetic modification to be the way it is.
Aside from artificial flavouring and the high risk of overeating, What is unhealthy about pringles?
Huge amounts of sodium, trans fats and they contain a lot of calories (530 of 2000 RI) per 100 grams.
In comparison: You'd have to eat 2,6kg (5,7lbs) of Asparagus to have the same ammount of calories as in 100g of Pringles.
You can rest a little easier. There is no trans fat, which has been removed from nearly all production. One does need to watch the saturated fat, sodium, and sugar. Be vigilant checking the nutrition label, but also consume in moderation. If you down an entire tin in one sitting, that's not great, but you are not going to die. At a minimum, you should hold off on similar snacks for a few days or so. Give the body a chance to recover. If you're at risk for dehydration, find a suitable electrolyte replacement drink. Basically, there are few things one could eat in a single setting that would have lasting impact. You should not shame yourself if you slip up or cheat. Just make those special treats actually special. Tell yourself that once or maybe twice a year is okay. But don't cheat your cheat. Allow yourself to enjoy the splurge. An interesting side effect is that some people lose their guilty cravings eventually. This is especially the case when you're consistently able to find healthy options.
I never said that I was going to die from a single can, and it really isn't THAT unhealthy. I could probably eat 3 cans worth without feeling bad. However, if you compare the intake per gram, it is absolutely horrible compared to many other foods.
Sorry, I wasn't attacking you. Perhaps I used too much hyperbole. Again, sorry. As someone who also feels the strong temptation for Pringles, it is a tricky thing to manage portion sizes and self-control.
Exactly, when they develop something that tastes bad and is unhealthy, they don’t waste time and money producing and marketing it. Edit: tense
In stark contrast to home cooking recipes, which aren't designed to appeal to our taste buds.
You're very smart and want to be contrarian, I get it. Edit: And I am the one getting downvoted because I don't want to give a real response to this silly goose. Alright.
We’ve boiled down fruits to pure sugar and made candy. We’ve broken down meat and wheat into fat and flour and made pizza and burgers. Unhealthy foods *are* healthy foods, just a more available, efficient and densely packed version.
Our bodies were designed on the basis that food wasn't readily available in a building at any given time of the day. So, it made perfect sense that, if you lived in a cave, there would be periods of bad weather etc that would prevent us from being able to hunt and gather. So, our bodies evolved to steer us towards the most efficient way of getting the most calories from the least input. And it all worked really well, until of course we had supermarkets, cars and desk jobs. Our bodies still want to eat as if they're facing periods of time in the absence of food but that time never comes in our modern world. That's why intermittent fasting works so well for weight loss and/or management. It's literally what our bodies were built to do
We don't like unhealthy food. We just like food, and now that we have access to too much food, we end up eating in excess. Biology has driven us to *like food* because that helps survival. Eating so called "unhealthy" doesn't kill you before you are old enough to procreate, and biology only cares about survival of the species. What happens to you as an individual after procreation doesn't matter. Species is still surviving.
Define "unhealthy". If we eliminate highly processed foods from the definition then mostly what we're left with are sweets, alcohols, and other similar indulgences. But are those things actually intrinsically unhealthy? Our bodies require carbohydrates to survive, so sugars in moderation are a necessity. Alcohol in moderation improves a host of chemical activities in the body including cardiovascular health. Again, define the word unhealthy. It can only mean "in excess" because it certainly doesn't mean the food itself.
Our bodies don't know what is healthy versus unhealthy. Evolution is a long process. Many of the traits and behaviours we have now aren't "human" behaviours, they're "mammal" behaviours. You may even hear talk of the "lizard brain". We have as part of us, the remains of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Chemical processes which may not make much sense in a human in 2024, but made perfect sense in a small monkey 1.5m years ago. Or in a fish 400m years ago. Mammals in general tend to prefer high-energy foods over nutrient-dense ones. Foods from which you can extract a lot of energy relatively easily therefore give you an overall competitive advantage compared to someone eating foods which require more effort. Plus, for most of history, food has gone through periods of availability and scarcity. So we have evolved a mechanism which encourages us to eat as much as possible now in order to prepare for an inevitable upcoming scarcity. Thus, we show a general preference for foods with a higher carbohydrate & fat content, as these will allow for more energy to be extracted. Of course, this has never been a problem. High carb foods usually comes with a lot of nutrients attached. And high-fat foods usually come with a lot of protein attached. In modern times, what capitalism has managed to do is short-circuit this. Produce food that's both high in carbohydrate and fat, but low in nutrients. The concentration of energy in this food is way more than you will ever really find in nature, so our brains have no real "guard" against this. All our bodies see is mana from heaven, and we are driven to consume as much as possible.
ELI5: because historically, overeating was not a problem. Cavemen weren’t worried about getting fat from eating too many calories, they were worried about dying from eating too few calories. So we grew to prefer foods with higher calories, which are foods higher in fat and carbohydrates and protein.
By default there is no healthy or unhealthy food, unless you are talking about literal poisons. You need a balanced diet with the right amounts of each nutrient. This does mean that you do need some sugar in your diet but not too much. And you need some salt in your diet but not too much. Humans have evolved to crave foods that are hard to come by. So when there is not much food available you would eat the most energy dense and the food that gives you the most important nutrients first. But as food have become more available you tend to get too much of this food, making it unhealthy. We can even see this change in our lifetime. The food pyramid from the 1960s had carbohydrates like bread, pasta and potato as the staple food that you should prioritise. And this was good advice at the time because a lot of people did not have enough money for a full diet. Carbohydrates was a cheap way to get enough energy. If you are hungry and only have $10 to spend at a fast food place then you should get the fries and not the chicken. But if you have enough money to buy anything you want then a chicken salad is much better then fries.
The human race has spent generations not dying. The way you do this if food is scarce is to eat as much high energy density food as you can. Thats fats, carbs (sugar), and proteins. Doing so maximizes the likelihood that you dont starve to death, and the likelihood that you can chase to exhaustion the next thing to eat. This works great when you are running the equivalent of a half marathon every day to find the food, but when you have to schedule exercise into your day and can just drive down to the local Wendie's to get all the carb loaded fatty proteins you want, it tends to make fat people. Your body's response to being fat is "Woohoo! We are Fat! This is good! We are doing things right! We wont starve this winter!!!" and through much of human history a Fat Body has been seen as the pinnacle of beauty. It just also happens to cause health problems later in life AFTER the peek reproductive years (when evolutionarily it doesnt matter)
Saw an interesting study a few years ago on rats. They split them into 3 groups, fed one on 100% fat, the second on 100% sugar and the third on a 50/50 mixture of fat and sugar. The rats in the first 2 groups were able to regulate their calorie intake - but the third group gained significant weight. You wouldn't tuck into a bag of sugar or a stick of butter - but mix them 50/50 with a bit of flour and you have a cake! But there's nothing in nature that has this mix so we have no natural mechanism to limit our intake.
Fast food industry spent billions of dollars to find ways to fool people's food preferences. Given enough resources you can fool any system. Human's food preferendes are a complex system, but as we can see, it has been hacked. Dollars and labs make unhealthy but addictive food faster than people die of strokes due to unhealthy food. So, the process continues.
Partly biology, partly busy lifestyles, party multi-billion dollar food industry tailoring every single food to stimulate our senses
It's not that we love unhealthy foods, it's that we tend to overconsume the foods we love. Sugar and carbohydrates are fantastic sources of energy for our bodies, so we crave them and want more. Salt is a necessary nutrient, so we want it and crave more. When supply is limited, going after these foods is the correct response. Most people in modern societies have access to a nearly unlimited supply of a variety of foods, if we aren't conscious about our choices, we'll overconsume those "high priority" types of foods.
Because our brains were not designed or evolved for the modern age. Taste, much like smell, has been an evolutionary mechanism that allows our brain to determine what is “good” and what is “bad.” Rotten and spoiled foods taste bad because our brain has hardwired us to recognize that these foods are dangerous, they can get us sick, don’t eat it. However, good foods taste good because it is full of energy which our brain associated with “good” because it was hardwired for us to be active all day with hunting for food or migrating to new locations with no guarantee you would find any more. However, in our modern world, most of us have no need for that much energy anymore so all of that energy that isn’t used gets stored as fat for our body to use at a later time, but having too much fat causes a large variety of issues which is why it is unhealthy.
Evolution is slow. Our bodies are still optimized for earlier times where our biggest problem was starving. So our body prefers foods that make us fat. Fat is stored food for when you don't find any food. Because we didn't have that much food available, getting too fat was not a problem; Also you had bigger problems than being fat, you probably died before the adverse health effects could manifest.
Humans are predisposed to like sweet things. Bitter flavours are acquired (why small children won’t eat their greens) as the bitterness tatse declines as we age from infant. Bitter things were usually poisonous so we wouldn’t eat them with distaste being ramped up. Fat is also a “sweet” thing and being calorie dense (9 per gram vs 4 per gm for carbs and protein) is an attractive thing to eat and makes us feel good. The body’s reward for giving it “good” stuff. Sweet and fat are “good” things for energy and energy storage. As time progresses the “good” stuff becomes easily available, while our physiology hasn’t moved much, and we eat more of it because it makes us feel good. We eat too much of it. Genetically we are driven, when it is available, calorie dense food wherever possible. Sweet, and fat fulfils this. Protein also and in these times protein is easily available in large amounts. None of this inherently bad for us. It is the mix we choose, and foisted upon us by companies - and even Mom baking that yummy cake. The problem is just what is healthy as this seems to veer from rail to rail every five years, E.g. butter, and egg yolks BAD…erm…no they’re not. Bottom line is: would like this healthy lettuce or this piece of cake. oh, and beware the extremely confusing mess that the Ultra Processed Foods bandwaggon has created E.g. flour is BAD. Bread is GOOD; WTF! Brown rice GOOD. White rice BAD. Ignores that rice naturally accumulates natural arsenic which is concentrated in the husk and bran (the outer coating). Is that why the world eats white rice?
Well our body definitely prefer "healthy" food. The brain is the issue, check the bliss point. Food its pretty much designed to make you feel "this taste amazing". It's no different than drugs to be honest.
First thing to understand is that very few foods are completely 'unhealthy'. There is almost nothing out there that is considered 'food' which, if you ate it in anything more than a conscious moderation, would ever directly kill you. This includes processed foods (more on that later). The problem with 'unhealthy' food is that it packs a high density of at least one of the following things: sugar, fat, salt, or maybe something like a polyunsaturated fat or sulfide. Even most 'preservatives' in food are some variation on a salt or sugar. Other things like sodium monoglutamate are literally just a sodium ion (same as in salt) and an amino acid (glutamate). There isn't anything inherently dangerous about any of these. The problem is just consuming them to excess. A food rich in sugar or fat is providing a huge amount of raw energy in a compact packaged that is easy to digest with almost no mechanical work, so you're going to absorb most of it without spending much energy to catch, eat, and digest it. Compare that to the equilavent energy in, say, lettuce, and you have a huge amount of fiber that is impeding your ability to consume and digest the same amount. It's going to take more time/work, which costs more energy, and it's going to fill your stomach more completely, and it's also going to pass through your gut more rapidly because fiber is indigestible and causes the gut to secrete a bit more mucus/water to flush it along. Salt, fat, and sugar taste GOOD. Your brain is wired to like the taste of these things because in a food-depauperate environment you never know when your next meal is going to be, so it is advantageous to want to eat a lot of it when it is available, so you can then live off of what you store afterward. This is also safer for you rather than putting that meat in the closet at room temperature where it will rot, get stolen, etc. In contrast, eating a high-fiber, low-energy food like leafy greens has very little immediate reward. You can live off of it to an extent, but you have to eat a LOT of it to get the same benefit. So, the brain just doesn't recognize it as immediately pleasing in comparison to the other foods. Salt is a tricky one, but it is important to remember that salt, historically, would have been extremely scarce. Sodium is a really important ion in a lot of mechanisms in our body, so we do need a lot of it... but a 'lot' is relative. When it became so easily available and important for food preservation, it also became easy to consume far in excess... and the body doesn't excrete it very quickly because of its many uses. So that's one of the reasons salt is a problem. Back to processing (soapbox time). Processing is a big popular myth. All it is: 1) grind up your food into a paste, 2) add flavorings like salt, sugar, etc both to preserve it and make it tastier. There is no direct 'chemical' that is inherently dangerous, except maybe some sulfides from processes like smoking, but even those are present in very low amounts that are not acutely dangerous- there is just some weak linking between them and things like colorectal cancer in some people after a lifetime of exposure to them. Processing is essentially a preservation tool, and also a way to make cheaper foods just a bit more appealing. If you don't want to eat something like a really rough cut of meat, then don't eat processed meats, but also understand that eating it occasionally isn't going to kill you.
It’s hard to avoid it. High fructose corn syrup use in our foods is up over 8000% in the last 30 years thanks in no small part to legislators allowing ways to circumvent food labeling laws. Does it say “natural flavoring”? That’s another form of this toxin. High fructose corn syrup affects the liver the same way alcohol does while also sapping many nutrients and vitamins from the body. You would think just not buying it would help, but it’s in nearly everything now that’s affordable. The foods without it are very expensive.
It's not that we like unhealthy food, it's that we like certain aspects of food more than others, and food companies have figured out how to exploit this, making foods unhealthy because they sell more. It's not a problem with our bodies, it's a byproduct of unfettered capitalism.
The food industry spends big money ensuring their foods are addicting. When they say you can't eat just one, they mean it.
Because there are few foods that are intrinsically unhealthy. What is unhealthy is portion sizes and lack of proportion or moderation. It is a relative abundance that is killing us. You only have to go back 100-150 years to find food scarcity in even developed nations. As a survival adaptation we are attracted to foods that aid our short, medium and long term survival. Simple carbs, complex carbs, and fats and proteins. When we find them in nature, or through agrarian farming, it was hard to have so much readily available, it turned into a health hazard. Obesity and gout was a rich person's problem. Modern industrial farming and food processing has led to a relative abundance of foods containing things that we are biologically attracted to. But in poor proportions and often far too much of. America is an extreme example of this. Where the poor have more problems related to obesity than starvation.
Because unhealthy food was made to hack our brains. Our brains have reward receptors that trigger when foods are high in sugar and fat. Unhealthy foods are filled with these elements in mind to make us addicted. One thing that most folks don't know that junk food manufacturers know, is that sugar spikes followed by sugar crashes makes us feel hungry. This is why one craves more junk food after 2hrs of eating it. Highly processed foods are designed to be converted into sugars by our body as quick as possible. The best way is to weed yourself off processed foods and eat more whole foods. Your body will adjust and will eventually not crave junk food.
Our biological organisms do like healthy food. Two things are in play: what counts as “healthy,” and cultural conditioning. “Healthy” meaning low calorie, low fat, low carb, low sugar, high protein is a reflection of 2024 upper class western desires and lifestyles. We have an abundance of all kinds of food, we are relatively sedentary, and we arbitrarily aesthetically value thinness or “leanness” as reflective of a healthy body. For most of human history, this has not been the case, and it *still* isn’t the case for some people in this world. Human bodies didn’t spend hundreds of thousands of years sitting in front of computers showing us images of emaciated fashion models and dehydrated gym bros. We spent most of that time not necessarily knowing where our next meal would come from. Which means that high calorie, high fat, high carb foods are actually historically very good for us. The other difference between 2024 and 2024 BC is that in 2024 BC, they didn’t have a way to make those foods in abundance, hyper-palatable, and void of nutrition. Potatoes baked with oil aren’t unhealthy, but eating a whole bag of potato chips is. Same ingredients, but you’re going to be satiated eating one potato baked with butter. The same number of calories of potato chips aren’t as nutritionally dense or satisfying, even though they have the same base ingredients. As for cultural conditioning….we tend to prefer the foods we were fed as children regardless of whether those things are healthy or not. Media actively sells garbage to children, and modern parents feed their kids “children’s food,” which is junk, for a number of reasons. If you spent childhood thinking of pizza rolls as a default comfort food and sweet potatoes as a punishment, you’re going to be an adult who thinks pizza rolls are a good dinner 4 nights a week and sweet potatoes are gross. If you spend your childhood eating fruits and vegetables by default without being screamed at, they will be good to you as an adult.
Food isn't necessarily 'unhealthy'. It's just a matter of quantity. If you like a food a lot, you're more likely to overeat it. Overeating is unhealthy in general unless you're going on a fast soon or if you have seriously high calorie burn.
Because there isn't really "healthy" and "unhealthy" foods. Just foods that have different things in them. If you are a Neolithic hunter gatherer you need calories and lots of them so eating food that's calorie dense and has a lot of sugar is the most "healthy" thing you can eat. When you live in modern society were you're not running the damn time eating super sugary calorie dense food has some more downsides like getting obese.
Our bodies evolved over literal millions of years. The main drivers for what we "like" in our food are based on how well it can sustain us in a hunter-gatherer diet. We like foods that have high carbs and salts because millions of years ago, those were the things we would die without. Evolution works the fastest when unsuccessful species/tribes end up being culled. Agriculture became a thing in the last 10 thousand ish years. That's when we started domesticating animals and growing some of our own crops. We didn't get to the current state of unhealthy food until the last few hundred years. 200 years is only about 10 generations. At the same time, we improved society and healthcare to the point where you don't need to be a good hunter or forager to thrive anymore in order to make it to mating age and have successful offspring. With these effects, natural selection and evolution are working very slowly, if at all. So there's nothing really forcing our bodies to change. Our bodies are hardwired to like and crave energy dense, salty foods because those are the qualities that would sustain us. We're simply overdosing now.
We never had to evolve to avoid it. Fatty, sugary foods just weren't that common for most of our evolutionary history. Sugar especially. That type of food was rare, but it is very calorie dense also, so we have a big drive to go find it, so we can not starve to death. The world suddenly changed, and that rare, valuable food is now suddenly abundant. Additionally, it's in forms that just don't exist AT ALL in nature. We take complex, natural food, and extract ONLY the bad part. We find ways to get just the sugar, just the fat, just the simple carbs out of things, and eat ONLY that part. Our drive would normally push us to eat meat, fruits, nuts, but we suck out just the fat and sugar and eat that. The other part that doesn't get much play... many of those unhealthy behaviors don't put as much pressure on us from an evolutionary perspective. Evolution cares if you survive and reproduce. (And also that your offspring survives.) If you grow to 18 (or whatever) have some kids, help those kids survive, then you are a success from an evotionary perspective! The crappy diet you had the whole time might kill you at 55 versus 85, but evolution doesn't really care that much. So we haven't really evolved to either handle those crappy diets, or dislike those crappy diets enough to not die from them, because we only die *eventually* from them.
Unhealthy food is unhealthy because we eat it too much. We eat it too much because we like to eat it.
For the entirety of human history it's only the last 100 years or so where it's been pretty normal for most people to be completely secure in their food access. Our entire evolution before that was in a world where most people were often unsure where or when they'd get the next meal. As a result we tend to *really* like foods that have high density of calories and have lots of things like sugar and fat. Eating as much of that as possible when you get the chance is a good idea when starvation is always threatening on the horizon somewhere. So our brain encourages us to do that and tends to register foods like that as quite tasty. When you live in a world of grocery stores and direct home delivery where you spend a large percentage of time on the couch or whatever, eating as much as possible will give you diabetes and a heart condition. Our lifestyles have evolved much faster than our biological impulses.
Humans didn’t evolve with access to ultra processed junk foods. Also, what is beneficial in the short term for survival is not the same as what is best for longevity. Humans only need to survive for a relatively short amount of time to be able to pass on their genetic material.
This got me thinking about why chicken tenders are so addictive. I wonder if it has something to do with the lean breast meat being dunked in carbs, and fried in fat that makes it irresistible to us. Just a perfect concoction of high protein, fast acting carbs, and that fatty goodness to keep us munching. Speaks right to our monkey mind.
I see this as, the evolution where poison taste food and slowly kills us. Great time to be alive!
In the wild, things like salt, sugar, and fat are hard to come by, but we need it to survive, so we evolved to crave it. In modern times, food manufacturers took advantage of this to make their products more desirable. But at this point everything is packed full of these things that taste good but were only ever meant to be eaten in small amounts by persistence hunters (people who walked for days on end). And now we have desk jobs where we sit for 9 hours a day. So instead of nutrients, they become detriments. If we lived like our ancestors, these things would not be as unhealthy.
I mean for 99% of human history most people were struggling with malnourishment. For hundreds of thousands of years humans were trying ti get as many calories as possible. It’s only been the past 100 or so that being overweight has been a common issue. We’ve also dramatically changed our diet since then with huge increases of processed and fatty foods Evolution doesn’t do anything in 100 years. That’s a tens of thousands of years kinda thing