This is it right here.
Also fruit doesn’t taste as good as pastries. You keep forgetting that part. If fruit tasted as good as pastries, grocery stores would sell more of them.
Most of the above is, to me, accurate. But I always fall back on the master’s comments when it comes to this.
Stage one of Human Evolution: What can we eat?
Stage Two: Why do we eat?
Stage Three: Where shall we have lunch?
It’s all about availability and productivity. Human civilization has evolved from a hand-to-mouth survival model to one where we preferentially choose for, cultivate, and breed things we LIKE to eat. Hundreds of generations of our ancestors decided what you find in your grocery store or on your plate, and we eat what we like. Calorie-dense foods, carbohydrates, sugars, etc. - the things that our plains ancestors would have (literally) killed for that we can find on the shelf of any convenience store, much less a grocer or specialty food store, for a few cents a pound.
I agree with whoever said it up-thread; there may come a time (and really ,we’re there in some hipster-inspired ways) where we crave radishes or carrot-analogues in a few thousand years. But I doubt we’ll ever lose our preference for fats and sugars.
To extrapolate that slightly, when people started making processed food for sale for profit they hone in on making it taste good so it will sell. More sales, more profits. Less profit in making healthy food that tastes crap when you can load up the processed food with salt, fat and sugar and sell heaps of it.
So most of the convenience food that now dominates the market in take away food places and pre prepared stuff in supermarkets has been built for taste, not health or balance.
As you say, the problem is quantity.
Interesting…but I guess my observation is that your classic blue collar worker (a mover, say) does plenty of isometric stuff and almost nothing even minimally aerobic for any duration. Sure; some huffing and puffing during a heavy lift, but then back to sedentary. And off hours, plenty of couch/food/beer combo.
I think what is best for us is probably moderate walking all day long.
And I don’t equate “fat” with poor health, per se, any more than thin means good health. If your BP, blood sugar and lipid levels are good, I’m not sure a beer belly is bad. It is true that they correlate, but not always.
It’s not grain, per se, that is to blame. You even emphasized the important word there: “HUGE amounts”. And then your almost admitting your claims for the fattening effects of grain are overblown, but confuse the issue with the nonsense-term “excessively-processed”. Grass wouldn’t be an option because it’s less energy dense, grain is quite energy dense even with minimal processing.
Then why are you blaming grains?
Oh, wait, you attempted an explanation for that earlier. “Pure fat and sugar by themselves are not all that appetizing”
Have you looked at the ingredients for ice cream or chocolate?
We’re not contesting that a diet high in grains can get you fat, we’re contesting your claim that grains and starches are more to blame, by virtue of properties besides the caloric content, than the the easy access to other high caloric ingredients.
As mentioned above, fat isn’t bad for you. Actually, you can die without enough fat in your diet.
Think of Ogg the caveman, living thousands of years ago.
If he had a craving for something sweet, what would he do? He’d seek out some fruits or berries, which would give his body the vitamins it needed.
If he had a craving for salt, what would he do? Just like a deer or buffalo, he’d probably head for a salt lick. That would have given his body the salt it needed.
If he liked the taste of fat, what would he do? He’d kill an animal, and eat some fat along with the meat. That would give him the fat he needed to keep warm during the winter months.
So, Ogg’s taste buds were steering him in the right direction. And Ogg’s descendants’ taste buds did them no harm at all, for centuries. Until VERY recently in human history, a perpetual surplus of food was not a problem.
Today, if we crave sugar, salt and fat, we can get a Whopper with cheese, French fries and a chocolate shake. Worse yet, most of us can get as many Whoppers and as many shakes as we want WHENEVER we want.
Ogg didn’t have that problem.
He went on to become a public domain digital-audio format, right?
Care to put money on that? 
You name the amount, I’ll bring the references to the best animal husbandry journals and research institutions.
No, as others have repeatedly pointed out, it’s not the grains, it’s the fat and sugar. Grains play a relatively minor role in weight gain.
So how do you explain that grains in places like Australia, where there are no subsidies, are even cheaper than in the US?
US grain subsidies reduce the price of US produced grain and allow it to force out imported grain. If the subsidies ceased, grain prices would probably fall. AT worst they would remain static.
IOW, grains are not in any way cheap because governments subsidise them. Grains are cheap because they cost SFA to produce, are easy to process and store indefinitely.
I live on a diet of exclusively GM corn, and I look 20 years younger than my age and feel 30 years younger.
You do realise that internet anecdotes are worthless, right?
Time to join in I guess. Weren’t you just saying grain is high in calories? If this was so you wouldn’t have more energy. I’m sorry if my logic is flawed but this is just an observation.
If you include “nearly two and a half years ago” in your definition of “just”, your snark would be on point.
I think I’ve gained 20 lbs since this thread was active! Must be all that opium in grain.
This. The choice b/w Burger King vs. lowfat yogurt for lunch has not existed long enough to play a role in the natural selection process. Our taste buds are still trying to convince us to go stalk and kill a protein rich saber toothed tiger with a pointy stick rather than play it safe and fill up on the grass growing outside of the cave.
I hear brains are high in fat.
I’ll give you peas, but broccoli? Broccoli can die in a fire. My mother insisted on forcing broccoli down my throat because, “IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!” No, something “good for me” shouldn’t taste so foul and bitter that my body violently reacts to it with explosive vomiting. Even today, after 32 years as a professional cook, I hate having anything to do with broccoli, because even the smell of it is almost enough to make me vomit.
You know what vegetable I never got as a child? Asparagus. And it wasn’t served in most of the places I’ve cooked. I ate my first asparagus just a few years ago (when I was over 40), while cooking at my city’s convention center. Wow, that’s some good shit.
Oh no. I was “habituated” to eating broccoli (and beets) in childhood, and I still hate it to this day. And as a child, my mom kept me away from excess sugar and fat. Broccoli still tastes vile.
I recently had a conversation with my now-elderly mom about vegetables, and I told her about some other vegetables that are “good for you”, which she never fed me because she didn’t like them: Onions and peppers. I don’t really blame her; she grew up with a father who only wanted to eat stuff like roast beef and potatoes, and her mother obliged by cooking bland food, so that’s what my mom was used to. I discovered, when my grandmother was in her 80s, that Grandma absolutely loved hot and spicy food. She just couldn’t cook it for Grandpa and my mom back in the 1940s & 1950s.
And that’s why I became a professional cook. I wanted food with flavor.
I still admire my grandmother, who passed away 14 years ago. Her doctor put her on a special diet. One day, she looked sadly at her plate, with tiny portions of bland food, and she said, “I’m 89 years old. How much longer do I have? I’m going to eat what I want.”
I didn’t write that every healthy ingredient tastes good, the point was that there is no inherent bad taste to healthy.
But by all means, lets keep this zombie alive to discuss your personal taste in vegetables.
It all depends on what you mean by “grow bigger brains”. Yes, primates had been growing bigger brains for tens of millions of years. A chimp has a fairly large brain, but only about a quarter of the size of human brains. Then about 800,000 years ago, one genus of primates rather suddenly took off. What happened 800,000 years ago? Two things: we were eating meat (although that wasn’t exactly new) and we started cooking our foods, which made a lot more calories available.
There was an interesting article in the Science Times yesterday relevant to this. There is an enzyme, amylase, that we use to convert starches to sugars. It is amylase in your saliva that makes bread gradually taste sweet as you chew it. Well, chimps have the usual two genes (one from each parent) for the manufacture of amylase, while humans have many more copies of the gene, up to 18 copies, according to the article. This appears to have evolved in response to the remarkable increase in available starch, made avaiable from cooking.
To get back to the OP, natural foods are what they are. Artificial foods are engineered to maximal taste. Natural foods have every interest in not tasting great. Processed foods have the opposite interest. Think how much processing chocolate has to go through to become edible.