Fritos vs. Celery and Why do we crave the former?

Factual Questions
1

Maybe I don’t understand biology or evolution correctly, but I believe it is in our evolutionary nature and best interests to stay alive and stay healthy long enough to reproduce.

That being said, why do our bodies tell our brains that we crave and enjoy things that are bad for us. I’m not necessarily speaking about alcohol or tobacco or drugs, but things like cholesterol and saturated fat and high calorie foods.

Wouldn’t our bodies, that need vitamins, minerals, complex carbs, proteins and water to survive, crave those things?

Why are we so attracted to big slabs of butter, creamy soft cheeses, fried things, salt, sugar…and bizarre snack foods like cheetos that serve no purpose to our bodies but flavor? I would think a healthy body would reject those things.

J

2

Too much fat is bad for us, but if you’re not drastically overfed, which has been the case for most of the people that have ever lived, fat is a good source of calories, so we’ve evolved a taste for it. Craving fat is only bad for those of us who have plenty to eat.

3

Remember, we evolved into a world where food was scarce. Back then, craving the most efficient food source was a successful survival strategy. Times have changed, but we haven’t.

4

Using your example, cornchips are a better source of energy than celery, which actually has negative calories (it takes more calories to process than the total number of calories in the food)!

I think, in a healthy person (i.e., a person sans diseases or disorders) craving energy foods vs. non energy foods is the norm. Of course, I’m not a doctor so I may be way off base here…

5

This was covered in GQ recently. Although celery is not a high-calorie food, it does not have negative calories.

6

Ummmm… fried celery.

7

Two words: fat and salt. Our bodies crave them, and if you dip celery into fatty, salty spread, I would contend that it becomes about as desireable as the Fritos.

8

Anthracite: that’s my question -

Why do our bodies crave fat and salt rather than healthy things like a big bowl of carrots or apples?

I understand that food used to be scarce in the world, but it isn’t any more, by a long shot, and so several generations of Americans at least, should have bodies that essentially say “uh…we don’t need or like all that coconut oil you’re chugging”

9

It took humans 20,000 years to change to a lighter pigmentation as they migrated north out of Africa. While that age won’t correlate directly to dietary changes, it does illustrate the length necessary for fundamental biologic alteration to occur.

10

But even if we aren’t talking evolutionary scale type changes, why does our body accept things like Pork Rinds or Cheetos?

If we drink too much alcohol or smoke too much tobacco or take too much heroin or even one too many Advils, our body recognize that it’s bad and pukes it up.

Shouldn’t a healthy body with an adequate amount of fat recognize when it’s “overdosing” on things that have no nutritional purpose so to speak?

11

People need to survive to child bearing years, and not too far beyond to be succesful as a species.

Obesity doesn’t usually kill anyone off very early.
IMPORTANT:

Fat people reproduce at a clip comparable to non-obese people, and there is actually some evidence to sugget that woman who are ‘thin’ have lower birth weight babies and sicker babies.

Woman who are considered obese are actually better equipped with fat on the hips (critical to fertility and pregnancy) and producing breast milk (better for health of child).

12

Alcohol, smoke, heroin and advil aren’t food, and our bodies don’t recognize them as such. They are perceived as poisons, or not-food, and our bodies will kill themselves trying to get this stuff out of the system.

Salt, corn, and fat, however, are all things that the body needs when it’s time to walk a few miles across the veldt, chase down a gazelle, kill it, skin it, and carry it back to the hut.

mmm… peanut-butter-filled celery sticks…

13

Jar-

ALL mammals have cravings for salt, and most have a liking for sweets and fats. And, until a few centuries ago, that was a GOOD thing for humans, just as it's still a good thing for most wild animals.

Humans NEED sugar, salt and fat to survive. So, when God/Nature gave us a liking for such things, that was to our benefit. Thousands of years ago, a “sweet tooth” would lead a cave man to eat some berries or a piece of fruit. That was a very healthy thing. Man’s desire for sweets led him to eat things that gave him vitamins.

Similarly, in a pure state of nature, famine, drought and starvation are real dangers. Eating fats and storing up body fat for the inevitable hard times was a good thing, in the old days. A bear has a natural craving for fat, which is why he eats huge amount of fish skins (sometimes, he’ll ignore the fish’s best meat, and eat ONLY the skins!)- he likes the taste of the fat. And that gives him the body fat he’ll need to survive during the winter. So, in a pure state of nature, an animal’s taste for fat is beneficial, in the long run.

Finally, every mammal needs salt, and in a pure state of nature, salt is hard to come by. Man’s taste for salt led him to seek it out (perhaps at the same natural “salt licks” that deer and buffalo always flocked to).

So, until a few hundred years ago, a desire for sugar, salt and fat was a GOOD thing, which steered humans to foods they needed. What’s changed is this: we humans got too smart for our own good. We learned to mine salt, we learned to process sugar, and we learned to mass-produce fatty foods.

A caveman who desired something sweet would eat an orange. When you and I desire something sweet, we eat cookies! A caveman who desired fat had to hunt and kill a buffalo- that took a lot of effort, and didn’t yield all that much fat. When you and I crave fat, we can get all the ice cream or French fries we want any time we choose. A caveman who craved salt went to a salt lick. When we crave salt, we eat a bag of potato chips.

God/nature gave us good instincts for living in the wild. But we humans don’t live in the wild any more, and in 20th century America, our old instincts no longer lead us in the directions they were supposed to.

14

I think there’s a cultural point worth making here. If you’re not surrounded by take away joints and convience stores, your craving for deep fried burgers and Fritos ain’t gonna be that high. Additionally, if you’re source of dietary fat comes from say, olives and nuts, when you’re in the mood for something tasty, chitlins ain’t gonna cut it.

15

Under natural conditions, it was nearly impossible for us to get “too much” fat or salt - especially considering the amounts of exercise needed for a hunter/gatherer life style. A bit of excess poundage acquired in flush times could be critical for survival when conditions turned bad, as they often did. Therefore, there was no need for us to evolve an “off” switch for our cravings for these dietary necessities. We don’t have a very effective internal thermostat to tell us when we have had enough.

As others have pointed out, the examples of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs are not really applicable since these are poisons, not foods.

16

Mmmmm…Salt lick.

I find this to be true. Once you cut back/eliminate fatty/junky things from your diet you crave them less and less (after the obligatory and miserable “withdrawal” period.) In fact if you follow a strict vegetable/grain/fruit diet for a bit, then decide to have a hamburger and fries as a “treat/reward” your body WILL reject it and you’ll spend the night in the bathroom in extreme discomfort. (First-hand experience.)

17

I’ve read that we have also developed a taste for salt because salt was used to preserve food before refrigeration was invented. This is a cultural thing rather than a biological thing.

18

Perhaps we crave fatty foods because we’re not meant to live to be a hundred. Maybe nature’s way is that we mature, reproduce, raise our kids to maturity, then die of a heart attack so as not to waste resources intended for the youngsters.

19

This is the famous teleological fallacy. Nature has no purpose.

20

Is that how cows keep their milk from going bad?