Evolutionary explanation for healthy foods being disgusting?

Factual Questions
1

Well, i know that some foods taste bitter so that the early food foragers could spit them out, because bitter = bad for you(maybe poison or something else). I also know that some of our cultivated crops(almonds and tomatos) come in bitter and sweet form in the wild, while the bitter is poisonous and the sweet is a fortunate mutation.

Yet - why do alot of healthy foods like brocoli and many other vegetables are not tasty, wile greasey, unnutritious foods are addicting and yummy? Why would evolution make our taste buds turn against us?

Fast foods restaurants cater to the masees taste buds after all. So - Why the fast foods restaurants dont serve brocoli nuggets instead of big macs? Why kentunki fried chicken is not soy sauce baked lettuce?

And why sugar(especially in its evil processed version) tastes so good? Why would evolution want us to crave bad food?

2

I love broccoli. Maybe you’re cooking it badly?

3

Fats and sugar = energy. We evolved back in the stupid ages, before we figured out agriculture, when there was a good chance of food being scarce. So it made sense that our bodies would evolve to prefer the taste of foods with the highest energy density.

4

That too. :smiley: Is there broccoli in my teeth?

5

Historically, fatty and sugary foods were rare. Only in season, perhaps, or you had work extremely hard to get them. Sugar and fat are critical to survival, so when you came across those foods people who indulged were more likely to survive. Also, I imagine the palate wasn’t so accostumed to all that sweet and fat, so vegetation tastes were the norm.

Of course I’m speaking with a broad brush and not using evolutionary correct terms, but that’s my understanding of it.

Plus, not all of us think veggie are bad tasting. I love plain veggies, though butter nd sauces (fat/sugar) taste good on them too!

6

I didnt say EVERYONE dont like vegetables. The majority of people would prefer a big mac over brocoli, and if you dont, youre the exception not the rule.

7

donuts the perfect food, and you can store them on a stick.

given enough state fairs, everything gets deep fried and served on a stick or in a bucket, even veggies.

8

Right. For millions of years, our diets consisted of a huge array of things, lots of fiber, fruits and nuts, as well as bugs and grubs, and meat. Most dietary problems result from focusing too much on just a few.

Most animals “live lean”. That is, the energy they get from food barely covers the energy they expend to get it (and also cover the “rent” of background energy needs). That balance tends to be maintained by evolution: if there’s an excess of energy, that energy gets put to use doing something to improve “fitness” (number of progeny).

So, running lean as we did, when we did find rich food sources, itwas a bonanza, and it made sense to eat all we could possibly hold – and not just once, but for days if possible. Get fat if you can! Because you’ll need that fat during lean times.

Also, many of the diseases attributable to unhealthy diets happen at advanced ages, generally over 40. First, most hunter gatherers probably didn’t live much longer than that. Second, most of those who do are past their reproductive periods. So there’s little evolutionary pressure against diseases of old age.

Finally, many of the problems of high calorie diets are only problems when there’s little excercise. Lack of exercise is a relatively recent phenomenon.

As we all know, free radicals are bad. That’s why we hear all this stuff about antioxidants (which unfortunately don’t actually help). Free radicals are protons that leak from mitochondria (the energy producers in cells) when the mitochondria has all the fuel it needs but there’s little demand for energy. Decrease the fuel or increase the energy and that leakage mostly goes away.

Interestingly, there are animals that don’t have this leakage problem, and that live very long lives (IIRC, some turtles are examples.) For whatever reasons, there were evolutionary pressures to fix the leakage for a few animals, but not for the vast majority where this is an issue, especially among mammals IIRC. For more on this, Power, Sex, and Suicide by Nick Lane. This may not reflect consensus opinion of biologists, but it’s a good read.

9

H/Gs would have a high infant mortality rate and high death rate during childhood, but once they reached adulthood, I don’t think it’s correct to say most would die before 40.

10

Veggies are disgusting because folks back in the 1950s didn’t know how to cook, and we’re only just now starting to get over that. If you have any clue what you’re doing, they’re great.

Here’s a tip: Never, ever boil any vegetable unless you’re making soup.

11

Not to mention that much of what passes for vegetables today are designed for easy shipping and long shelf life, rather than taste. Witness your standard supermarket tomato.

Our H/G ancestors wouldn’t even recognize what we call “vegetables”, almost all of which have been domesticated and altered beyond what their wild ancestors were like. H/Gs would eat a lot of berries and nuts and tubers, maybe some tender shoots or water plants.

Broccoli didn’t exist prior to about 2,500 years ago. What makes it taste good? Sauteed lightly in olive oil, with some salt and pepper. Raw, it’s someone palatable, but not so much.

12

This is true. Now, if you ignore all modern transportation, agricultural and food processing techniques, and you catch an aurochs and kill it, and then you cut off his hide and cut out a 1/4 pound of meat (I’ll allow a knife, but even that’s a labor saving device we didn’t always have) and chop it into teeny tiny bits, and then you catch a cow and you milk it and make cheese from the milk, and then you walk around for most of an afternoon picking wild growing wheat and grind that wheat between two stones to make flour, and then you walk to the river 2 miles away to get water for the dough, and on the way back you look for some wild lettuce like greens to bring back with you (and I hope you’ve already made the 20 mile walk to where the traders are so you have some salt and did you remember to gather wood and build a fire and boil the fat from that aurochs to make clean oil so you can make mayonnaise? Don’t forget you’ll also need to find a bird’s nest with a freshly laid egg, gather enough twigs to make a whisk, and find a bowl-shaped stone or carve a bowl out of wood to mix it in) and then you build a ground oven, mix your bread dough (forget about yeast for the moment) and bake it, and then you build another fire, go searching for a flat rock and cook your aurochs burger over the fire and melt the cheese over it…yeah, you’ve expended more than enough calories for that “big mac” to be a healthy meal.

Oh, right…you still need to find a pickle bush and a mustard plant and a tomato plant, only tomato plants before agriculture gave teeny tiny currant sized fruits, so it’s going to take you a whole bunch of gathering to make enough to get ketchup…

It’s not that food today is necessarily bad, it’s that it’s incredibly cheap, in terms of the labor you have to do (calories you have to expend) in order to get it.

13

I like it both ways, for different reasons. And before that time, it was “wild cabbage,” Brassica oleracea, which is also cabbage, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, savoy, and Chinese kale. They’re the same plant, different parts are eaten or emphasized by human cultivation. Not much evolutionary about it, unless it’s meant co-evolution with humans.

14

The way your palate is developed during childhood has a lot to do with what you think tastes good. Most Americans are raised on processed food and a shit ton of sugar, and this is what they prefer as adults.

I was raised from infancy eating all home cooked meals (no baby food), tons of veggies, lots of variety and strong flavors, (different kinds of cheeses and meats, preserved fishes, garlic and onions, huge variety of spices in cooking), and almost no sugar. Veggies were my very favorite food as a toddler and child, so much so that my mother had to force more high-calorie stuff down me to make sure I grew properly. I was exposed to processed foods for the first time when I started school, and I never liked them. Soda tasted foul to me and still does. I can’t even drink 100% fruit juice without diluting it with water, the insane sweetness is just gross. Outside of a blip from 17-21 or so, when I worked in a restaurant and bought my own food and lived with people my age who ate crappy, I’ve always eaten extraordinarily “healthy” - because it’s what tastes good to me. McDonald’s does not taste good. It tastes like meaty freezer burn coated in vegetable oil with a side of sugar syrup.

I do eat a great deal of beef and I love my home-made burgers, but Big Macs are bleh, and a well-prepared cruciferous vegetable is absolutely delicious.

15

I was, likewise, raised by a woman who viewed Adelle Davis as a Deity. NO white or brown sugar AT ALL (partly because of good ol’ Adelle, but also because Mom wanted to win a bet), only molasses or honey. I was breastfed exclusively for 12 months, and of course she made all baby food after that.She ground her own peanut butter, made her own yogurt, and I didn’t know granola also comes in a box until I was a teenager. We canned all our own tomatoes and peaches, froze blueberries we harvested ourselves, and I was without a doubt the only kid on the block who made handcranked pasta and egg noodles before I could skip. My mother ground her own wheat in a small mill my dad made her, for chrissakes.

Somewhere around 4th grade, I learned I could trade my homeground peanut butter and honey on homebaked whole grain bread for Skippy and grape jelly on white AND a Twinkie. If I acted just a little bit reluctant, sometimes I could get 'em to throw a Capri-Sun into the deal.

I f’in love MacDonalds. Sorry, Mom. You tried.

(But I *would *torch a small village for one of those peanut butter and honey sandwiches on Mom’s bread today. Sadly, she stopped baking when she started working full time.)

16

Sugar and fat are good in moderation. Back when we were evolving, they were not easy to get. Thus, it makes sense to crave them strongly so early humans would bother to get them.

17

Salt, too. There’s a reason animals congregate around salt licks. Salt is vital to the body, and often hard to find.

18

Broccoli has a compound that some people find bitter and others don’t. It’s kind of a love-it-or-hate-it thing, and which side you’re on is a fluke of human genetics.

19

The general thought is that we like sweet things not because sweet things are hard to get, but because fruit tends to be sweet when it’s ripe, bitter when it’s not.

Lots of things are hard to get, but we don’t necessarily crave them. We crave the things that we evolved to eat-- ripe fruits and berries and meat, among other things. Fat is an important source of fuel for an omnivore like us.

20

All that yummy unhealthy food you are talking about is the cooked down essence of regular old unhealthy food. Broccoli & Rice is to Donuts, as Cocaine is to crack.
People take a whole grain and strip it of all its nutrients and produce a substance that instantly effects your blood sugar so you feel euphoric (or at least I do after a donut.)