Given that other mammals and animals instinctively eat only what they’re naturally meant to eat (unless they’re pets, in captivity or are being fed specifically), how is it that humans are not the same?
I know that inflation on food pricing, companies manufacturing products, living in a society where we have a lot of ready-made foods including a lot of packaged foods, poverty etc contribute to the choices we make with food, but why are we not more drawn to the food we need to ensure we are functioning as well as we should be?
lets say its 20,000 years ago and youre running through the jungle. you come across a table with a bowl of broccoli or a bowl of donuts. your body wants you to eat those donuts because you can get as many calories in you as possible. eating the donuts would increase your chance of survival the most because more animals die from lack of energy rather than nutrients in the wild.
ancient humans got around 500mg of vitamin c a day. but humans only need 40mg a day. people werent dying of vitamin c deficiency. they were dying of calorie deficiency. the drive to consume as many calories as you can whenever its available was useful trait back then. but now we have calorie dense food in abundance and its a problem.
you could take any animal from the wild and design a food which makes them go wild and binge it all down even though its not good for them. pigeons and squirrels love all that fast food dumped on the streets of new york and will eat until theyre fat. its not just humans. but unlike animals humans evolved to be smart and design food which satisfies their tastebuds to a dangerous extent.
We didn’t evolve for an industrialized diet. “Unhealthy food” like sugar, salt, and grease, is normally hard to find in nature. When sugar is rare, sugar is a high value food with lots of energy. An ancient Egyptian farmer, who’s probably malnourished for most of his life, would experience a bag of Doritos as an invigorating potion of rare and precious electrolytes that awakens and empowers him.
We crave those things because in a state of nature they are rare, high value, important nutrients. But now we can cheaply and easily feed those cravings, in a way that was impossible at any other time in our evolutionary history.
High-sugar and high-fat foods induce serotonin. One theory for why this is, is that eating such foods and storing the excess calories as fat helped us to survive during times of no food. Other animals haven’t invented agriculture. If we hadn’t become farmers, and then shoppers, we would probably still be eating the food that our bodies evolved to thrive on. And there wouldn’t be nearly 8 billion of us. Unfortunately, our brains haven’t evolved as quickly as our access to food has changed. I literally have a post-it under my monitor that reads: “My brain evolved to make me an eating machine and my body evolved to store food for times of famine … THERE IS NO FAMINE! Eat accordingly. BRAIN OVERRIDE”
It seems that people have just assumed it’s basically as healthy as years prior. And the pushing that much of the responsibility lies on the individual to make the necessary dietary changes as well as the information overload meant to confuse and obfuscate.
It’s also collusion of increasingly bad policy, greedy corporate incentives, the rape and pillage of the natural world and the destruction on generations of fertile healthy soil. Plus much more!
We have the capability to manufacture products that activate our dopamine receptors. Other animals will have the same response to much of the food we eat, they just don’t have the capability to do anything about it on a large scale.
All mammals eat to survive. If food becomes plentiful it’s no longer about survival. Period. If you only eat enough to survive nutrition is out the door. Many centuries ago being fat was a sign of wealth.