While certain foods are a delicacy to some and awful to others, sweets seem pretty universal. Almost everyone likes something thats way too fattening. Granted, some people actually like broccoli, but have you ever had trouble getting a kid to eat their ice cream?
Its seems to me that liking foods that are bad for you crosses personal and cultural boundaries. There must be a biological reason to like these foods. However, it seems to run counter to evolutionary logic. If we were healthier we would be better able to survive and pass on our genes. Shouldn’t we like healthy foods?
Evolutionarily speaking, the good taste is to ‘reward’ (not in the sense of evolution doing something intentional, of course, just a figure of speech) us for eating something that has lots of sugars and fats, which are really high value foods in nature, and are quite rare. Our bodies need these high-energy foods to keep going.
Modern man, in his infinite wisdom :rolleyes: has made these foods so commonly available that we’re liable to get arteries clogged, fatten ourselves up to the point where it’s unhealthy, and so on.
We developed in scarcity, and now that we have such a bounty of high-sugar high-fat foods, we haven’t been able to modify our behaviors well in response. I think I’ll go off now and eat an armful of Big Macs and a tub of ice cream…
You can’t cook anything here in the South unless it’s full of bacon grease, or fatback. It’s the way we are taught to eat and cook since childhood. Talk about a bad menu.
I was just thinking the same thing as I contemplated whether to start with the ears or the feet of a chocolate bunny. Fattening things just taste better…that’s why they spend so much money trying to create fake fats with good “mouth-feel”, but they always seem to fail. Even diet pop just tastes horrible to me.
I’m always suspicious of people who claim to love the taste of low-fat versions of foods. They are the same people who cling so fiercely to their beliefs that they cannot change even when faced with evidence of the absurdity of their claim. They have staked so much of their righteousness on being right that they will not admit, even to themselves, that they really hate the stuff they are eating, or the hours spent sweating in the gym, or the stupid name their mother saddled them with.
As to survival of the healthiest, if you equate thinness with health, you run into a problem when it comes to reproduction: some women put more value on maintaining their shape than on reproducing, or their husbands pressure them to not get fat, so they would rather not get pregnant. Those of us who aren’t mortified by the weight gain of pregnancy and subsequent body changes tend to have more kids. I realize this is a very unscientific statement, but most of my very “healthy”, well-educated, upwardly mobile friends have none or one child, and those of us, equally well-educated, who carry a bit more weight have two or more. And daily I see women who never graduated high school who have four or more. So if “healthy” people won’t have children, they can’t pass on the determined genes, can they?
This was the topic of an old thread:
How come things that are bad for us taste so GOOD?!