Short Version:
Sugar, salt, and fat taste great. You naturally want to eat things that taste good, so why make the great tasting stuff bad for us?
Long Version:
I have a few night classes during the week so sometimes I curb my appetite with a little candy. Mmmm Starburst. It’s like fruit multiplied by ten! I know that the extra sugar isn’t ‘good’ for me, but oh boy does it taste good! And salt! Ah, some nice salty potato chips! How about some salt & vinegar potato chips? Mmmm…
Uh, anyway. How come the things that taste good aren’t good for us?! What kind of system is that? Starburst are like little compact fruitoids! Think of all the time and plants we could save! But no we can’t live on Starburst because they don’t have the vitamins that are in real fruit. How come vitamins don’t taste good? Why doesn’t calcium taste like ice cream or something? It seems like all the stuff our body needs is tasteless or yucky. If it tastes so good, why is it so bad for us?
There are a lot of healthy foods that taste good to me. Fresh fruit (in my case Granny Smith apples) taste very good. I can’t imagine what ill effects they have on me aside from some residual pesticides, which can be easily washed off.
I also enjoy eating fish. You’re not required to drown it in some fatty sauce.
In a larger sense, I think our brains are trained to think that fat and sugar are pleasureable. When we eat foods without those things, our brain must tell us, “Hey, what’s going on here?”
What makes you think fat, sugar, and salt are necessarily bad for you? All are absolutely essential for life. The problem is that our taste for these essentials developed in a time of relative scarcity, during which we also earned our living through physical work (hunting and gathering) rather than through typing on a keyboard while sitting stock-still on our asses. The problem is not that they are bad for us, per se, just that we eat to damn much of the stuff.
Also, the diseases associated with overconsumption of these substances mostly kill people after breeding age, so aversion to them would probably not be strongly selected against.
Hijack time: I’ve heard it said the the male human animal is attracted to fat and salt when he gets the munchies, and the female to sweets.
Hence the usual feminine swooning around the Board over chocolate, etc., while the “How Do You Like Your Steak” threads are usually crowded with salivating carnivorous beasty-boys.
I am not a bog chocolate girl. Huge salty snacke eater though, MMmmm Salt & Vinegar Chips, taste so good make me wannna HUH! Make me wanna eat MORE!
(believe it or not I am not 500 lbs!)
Foods that taste good usually have a high energy value per unit volume. If you have to expend energy to catch, find, dig, etc, your food it makes sense to evolve a taste for foods that that have a high energy payback versus procurement energy expended.
I never thought of it as a theological issue but broccoli is a very recent human invention, it wasn’t around in old tesament times.
I have nothing against Breyer’s but I love broccoli and have some almost every day. That such a divine vegtable could exist is evidence of a loving creator IMO
My Jesus fish can beat up your Darwin fish but forgives it instead.
I love broccoli too. But you can’t blame the people that don’t. We did an experiment in chemistry 101 to see if people could taste the chemical that makes people hate the cabbage family of veggies. The statistics came out exactly as it should have for the general public. Anyway, I could taste that chemical, but I LIKED it. Most people that can taste it are repulsed by it.
Now for the original question…
If you think about how people lived before they had lots of food processing, artificial flavors, and the like, craving sweets would have made you want to eat fruit (vitamin C, vitamin A) and craving salty would have helped you to get your electrolytes.
In modern times a lot of people’s taste buds are altered to what they would be naturally. Think about it, from birth many babies are given artificial infant milk that tastes exactly the same at every feeding, every day. Their taste buds don’t know anything else. Babies fed naturally get different flavors of lots of different foods and the sugar/fat/salt content changes from feeding to feeding. They get the flavors of veggies and whatever else mom has been eating. Statistically, these breastfed children are less likely to have a weight problem later in life.
I must have some guy genes in my makeup. Not only do I need salt in my munchies (potato chips, pretzels, et al) (chocolate is used for stress relief situations, not munchies time) but I salivate all over the steak threads. This must be related to my defective feminine genes that caused me to not understand the big problem with writing a name on a sheet and blanket for naptime.
Your Official Cat Goddess since 10/20/99.
“I’m a god. I’m not the God–I don’t think.” --P.C.
Okay, I’ll chime in with an opinion. I’m a chick, and while I LOVE chocolate with an undying passion, I also love red meat. I tried to give it up once (to try to be healthy) and I couldn’t stand it. I love rare steak. And to all the broccoli lovers out there, I’m with you! I think broccoli is absolutely the most fabulous veggie.
I wonder if, along with the taste, part of what makes us love junk food is the taboo our parents put on it (“You can have ice cream after you eat all your veggies.”) When I have kids, maybe I’ll try reverse psychology. “You may have carrots and potatoes AFTER you finish your pint of Ben & Jerry’s.”
As a vegetarian, steak does nothing for me. However, give me a good veggie burger any day.
Also, as much as I love chocolate (See’s Candies! Yum!) and ice cream (Dreyer’s) I absolutely love asparagus. It is a delicacy for me. Oh my word, good fresh asparagus, lightly steamed, is heaven. Don’t bother putting any butter on it, it doesn’t need it. Same goes for broccoli. And brussels sprouts. And, give me a good, crisp apple, or…(sigh) nectarines.
Sugar, fat, and salt are essential for our bodies to function correctly. Over history, our bodies evolved (read: natural selection, blah, blah, blah) a taste for these foods just like we evolved pleasurable feelings from sex. Our cavemen ancestors (or more accurately the little rats that were the first mammals) had this mutation that made these foods taste good to them and natural selection led those animals to outsurvive those who didn’t have the mutation. They ate more of these foods so they were healthier than the animals that didn’t eat them.
For animals, and in older days (read: 100 or more years ago), humans, such substances were/are relatively hard to come by, so they don’t have the opportunity to overeat these foods and feel the negative consequences. Humans today are able to produce whatever kinds of food they desire and thus we eat what tastes good, even if it’s in quantities that are unhealthy.
