(April 20, 2016 at 9:54 am)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote:(April 20, 2016 at 6:30 am)AJW333 Wrote: Call me a cynic but are you sure this was evolutionary? Seems to me we eat crap because of slick marketing and the food companies know how to get us addicted.
Good question! We call it being skeptical. It's okay!
We're encouraged to choose crap over healthier foods through marketing, etc., but that's not the only reason we crave it. Even the highest-quality gourmet meal will contain measures of salt, fat, and carbs (barring a couple of particular, deliberate diets that exclude same), because those are what our bodies crave. It's why "Diet" soda and "fat free" Ranch taste awful. Our brains have a dopamine-reward center that is triggered when we eat foods that would have provided calories at a time when food wasn't guaranteed to be available. (Salt, of course, is necessary for other reasons, and sugar seems to activate the opioid systems.)
What the food people have done is to lock in on the substances which our brains find addictive (for literally the same reason, and in the same brain-locales, as cocaine), and figure out the right proportions to make their product hit all those buttons, so to speak. They then put out advertising which reminds our brains how much we enjoyed those potato chips (salty, fatty, carb-filled snack) or candy bars (salty, fatty, sugar-filled snack, often with carbs).
You can Google it yourself, if you like... but the short version is that eating foods which would have helped our ancestors will trigger endorphin releases in your brain, which can be observed in brain scans
As a dietitian I can confirm Rocket's position. Our brains are "wired" to prefer the more calorie-dense macronutrients as a survival instinct. So, you don't have to feel guilty for reallllllly wanting that snickers bar. But maybe, don't eat four of them. [emoji12]
Nay_Sayer: “Nothing is impossible if you dream big enough, or in this case, nothing is impossible if you use a barrel of KY Jelly and a miniature horse.”
Wiser words were never spoken.
Wiser words were never spoken.