What problem? How have we modified food “so that they no longer contain the vitamins, minerals, or chemicals we crave in them anymore?”
Flintstones chewables ™
We don’t crave vitamins or nutritional stuff. We evolved to crave stuff that will help us survive.
Go out in the woods and take a look around. Lots and lots of fiber around and most of it is inedible. No need to crave fiber although it’s good for you. You’ll get plenty of it anyway. Let’s find something to eat. Hmmm… not a whole lot around.
Our basic cravings is for calories. We need lots of calories and there’s just not that much floating around in the wild. It’s why we crave sugars and fats. Lots of calories. We also crave salt. Need lots of salt, but there’s just not much around in the wild.
So, we search for things that are sweet, full of fat, and have salt. Back in the ol’ days of hunting and gathering, this was good to do. We also have a distaste for things with a lot of fiber. Fiber doesn’t provide calories and we get more than enough fiber through our low-tech diet. Low fiber stuff is easier to digest, so we crave that.
Evolutionarily, this is good. We are searching for stuff that we need. We are looking for calories in a low calorie world.
Now, comes modern science to the rescue! You crave calories? Thanks to industrial farming, we’ve got more than enough! Want fats? Want salt? Want sweets? We can manufacture food full of that stuff!
The trouble isn’t that we once craved things that were good for us and something went wrong. The trouble is that we crave the same things we craved back when we had to rummage in the wild for food, but the things we crave aren’t all that difficult to find.
You want fat. You want sugar. You want salt. You want low fiber stuff. You want calories galore. And, thanks to the free market, the invisible hand is mercilessly shoving all of that down our little gullets.
Intellectually, we know it will kill us, but evolutionarily, our bodies are saying “Yes! More! More! I need some more!”
And yet there’s this other evolutionary side of me that likes to be physically appealing to members of the opposite sex. Or at least not repulsive.
I’ve managed to stay single longer than all of peer group buddies. The straight ones, anyway. I’ve seen their waistlines. I’m no different. As soon as I don’t have a good reason to keep it under control, my pants size is going up a couple inches.
Are you a researcher, or are you reading research? It seems as though doing a Google search is enough for people to say that they “have done research”.
The decision to not eat fatty foods could be made alittle easier, should other countries follow suit. At the moment high fat content food is very cheap, in part due to subsidies for producing it. Vegetables and fruit are expensive in contrast. There are excise taxes in place for cigarettes (lung cancer etc.) and alcohol (liver failure etc.) but fatty foods arguably kill more people due to coronary heart disease (etc.). Should the subsidies be nullified for crops that tend to be used to produce fatty food, then applied instead to fruit, vegetables, exercise equipment and gym memberships, it would be a good step towards fighting that trend towards obesity.
I research other people’s research across many sciences and also the eating customs of about a half a dozen cultures and compare the similarities. I study journal entries and also study the supporting evidence for some that say they know whats needed for health. I conclude that there is no way that a diet necessary for the optimum health and intelligence of one person can be used by another and still have the same effect. When they get this Nutrigenomics thing figured out they may have a starting point but the genes have multiple switching patterns and it will take a hundred years at the present rate of increasing knowledge, along with mistakes, to perfect it. As far as cravings, I have done much studing and thinking on the subject. Crave coffee means craving magnesium sounds about right. Craving salt means craving cloride so eat fish sounds right but only if you’re sodium is sufficient in the body. When you stand there staring at a watermellon at the store you may be low on phosphorus. There are a lot of things our subconscious knows that we do not realize. Most people think that the only intelligence in a being is in the conscious mind. That philosophy is severely flawed. There is a terrabyte of information stored in the junk dna and many possibilities within the switches on our genes. Our genetic knowledge is important.
You’ve done a lot of research, but will cite none of it.
Right.
Take 500 sites and put them into you’re favorites and see if you can find what you’re looking for. Now take thirty thousand and put them into you’re favorites and see what happens. Anyway, it’s better not to keep evidence and be called “a little off” than to have documented evidence and be targeted by those whose way of life you may be endangering. I understand the basis of the present capitalistic society in general and know how laws have been formed to protect this structure and do not wish to interfere with it. I’m just trying to understand what’s happening.
Apparently, they make Kool-Aid with HFCS. :rolleyes: