You blood sugar doesn’t increase when you smell those donuts, so I doubt that’s why we eat them.
Break it into small florets, blanche in boiling water for 1 minute, chill and serve as a salad with ginger-soy dressing. Very good.
Yeah, I had a relative like that. Her children got no sweets, they had only raw sugar and tiny spoons for coffee, etc. When her kids were old enough, about 10, they would cycle down to the grocery store with their friend and blow their allowance on the cheapest sugar-water pop they could find, 2L at a time. Very much like another fellow, whose kids could only watch healthy, Christian approved TV. When they went to visit their friends, they could watch South Park, the SImpsons, R-rated movies, and such. At a certain point, children will find out about the real world.
Recall an interview with a day care worker and some kids from the original Rcohdale college in Toronto 40 years later. The one fellow said “you introduced me to sugar”. The worker brought in some pumpkin muffins with thick icing on them, and the child who had never had sugar products loved them so much, his parents were mystified when he kept demanding pumpkin muffins, they made him their finest healthy pumpkin muffins and he hated them.
What mystifies me is why starch, which is essentially like sugar, is so bland. How come we don’t gulp down starch like we would sugar? Yes, it can be good but raw flour is pretty bland.
Like others have said, “healthy” food for our paleolitihic ancestors was the highest calorie density stuff they could get.
In a sense, we have evolved to prefer “healthy” foods, but what happened is that in the last little bit (500 years or so) of history, we’ve come into such abundance that what was formerly a good thing is now just the opposite.
It’s not just the abundance, but the highly processed nature of the food we eat. It’s almost pre-digested. Even 500 years ago, if you were eating bread, you were eating whole grain bread-- not bread made from highly milled flour with all the fiber removed.
It’s because starch and sugar are different molecules, even if one is based on the other, just as ethylene and polyethylene are very different substances, more so for cellulose, which is also polymerized glucose but is also indigestible. Actually, starch isn’t very digestible either unless it is cooked.
It’s not just that; ever look at how many ingredients go into a simple loaf of bread from the store (example here)? I thought all you needed was flour, water, sugar, yeast and salt (you could even omit the sugar and yeast if you don’t mind flat bread; heck, flour and water alone might work in a pinch).
Of course, then there’s artificial ingredients like trans fats (not counting HFCS because honey has a similar composition, although nobody ate that much in the past), which can still be found in some brands of bread (and uncountable other foods, some of which claim to be healthier because they have no saturated fat or cholesterol).
Also, it’s interesting to note which food categories have increased in consumption in recent decades, with concurrent increases in obesity and diabetes - grains and added sugars and fats (the increase in added sugars isn’t actually that large compared to the other two).
The premise of the question is wrong. Sugar and “greasy unnutritious foods” are actually extremely nutritious, in the sense that you’ll stay alive for much longer by eating them instead of grass or leaves.
Most of that other stuff is to compensate for the stuff we take out of the flour and to make it look pretty and last longer.
ETA: Grass and leaves aren’t healthy, which is what the OP was getting at.
Starch is great when cooked properly, ie deep fried.
This somewhat misses the point. You just beg the question of why we would evolve to like sweetness.
When things are ripe they provide the maximum net energy benefit. We have evolved to be motivated to like to eat things in that state. And sweet things are hard to get: ripe fruit goes off quickly, and every other animal has done the same sums and come to the same conclusion: they have all “figured out” (ie evolved) that it is best to try to grab ripe fruit when possible, so there is maximum competition.
And as others have said, what our health doesn’t cope with very well (at least long term) is living in a way where we can get access to ripe fruit all the time, without expending any significant effort. Our brains have not evolved in a way that causes any restraint to kick in and say “too much easily available sugar all the damn time, stop fer Og’s sake!” because that was not a condition present during 99.99% of our evolutionary history. On the contrary, it was a condition that was so rarely present that the only imperative was to take maximum advantage of ripe fruit when available, without restraint. So that is what we are now doing.
The Roman elite ate white bread, and whole grain bread was the food of the lower classes:
I’m talking about all of the other stuff, many of which are chemical names, and why do you need multiple types of flour added (some at less than 2%). Even if it isn’t necessarily unhealthy, it would seem that it would be cheaper and more efficient to use as few ingredients as possible.
This is the crux of the matter. We may be accustomed to a permanent non-scarcity of food, but this is extremely rare. If you consider all animals that have ever lived, we’re in a very small privileged group. Same goes for if you consider all humans that have ever lived, or even (to a lesser extent) all humans that are alive today. The instinct to gorge oneself on empty calories while the getting’s good is almost always a beneficial one; we’re just the very small exception. (On preview I see that Princhester has said more or less the same thing, but I think that the solution to this problem with be a matter of medical technology rather than evolution).
…And for the record, I like broccoli quite a bit. It doesn’t matter if it’s stir-fried, steamed, or raw. The same goes for a lot of other veggies. Granted, I like them better when they’re beside a pork chop or somesuch, but they’re good on their own, too.
What mystifies me is that I enjoy more or less plain starch (with just salt an maybe a little oil or butter) despite its near-total lack of flavor. White rice, plain noodles, and mashed potatoes are all palatable to me.
Those foods aren’t just starch though; they have a lot of other stuff that contributes to flavor, which is why (to me at least) they all taste different. Similarly, protein probably doesn’t have much taste (or even a foul taste if a quick Google search is any indication); even glutamate, which is responsible for the umami taste, isn’t very tasteful by itself.