Why does unhealthy food taste so good?

Meenal Solanki
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

This may be a short half-baked theory, but my dough is multi-grain; meaning that there’s some thought behind my explanation, so read on…

As someone who has read Freud and doesn’t entirely disagree, I recollect him claiming this about addictions, “A mouth that doesn’t have another to kiss, becomes addicted to that cigarette” (I may have paraphrased from memory, but this was the gist).

And to put another theory to support my claim, remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

So after I know I have enough food, water and shelter for my life and safety, I go for social needs, friendship, companionship, love.

I believe somewhere in his disruptive theories, Mr Freud also talked about the death drive i.e. simply the drive toward death or self-destruction.

Thus, main themes in Freudian thought being to live to procreate (the sex drive/sexual instinct/life instinct, the biological & evolutionary reason behind our social need) or die.

Hence, humans are born to die, and before they perish, to leave their gene behind. Thus, if one is not kissing someone, one ought to be eating greasy pizzas/sugary doughnuts or smoking that cancerous cigarette. It’s very basic, going back to our animal instinct, if I’m not courting, it could only mean that

i) I have procreated and there isn’t much reason now for me to stay healthy much longer

ii) I am not procreating, which means I’m anyway a burden on nature’s resources

To summarise, I think that German perv knew exactly what he was talking about. And I take his claims to support my reasoning of why unhealthy is attractive, it’s because when we are not socially active, we are better dead. (Not really, just in evolutionary terms)

NOTE: Here’s a small note on why Sweet foods, while being harmful, are irresistible. Again, evolution is to blame. Many many years ago, we survived on fruits from the trees. A ripe fruit was sweet, anything that tasted otherwise (bitter being poisonous, sour being not as nutritious) was not edible. Thus, humans evolved a taste for fructose. And then we discovered sucrose from the sugarcane (sucrose extracted from the sugarcane helps keep food sweeter for longer, i.e. it can be preserved for longer than the perishable fruit). We were used to digesting fructose, now we’re hooked to the cousin, who’s sweeter, but has made us insatiable. 😉

This answer may also seem contradictory to popular theory that these foods are rich in carbohydrates which our bodies learnt to crave to survive in earlier times of scarcity. Maybe that’s true, who knows…

Published September 3, 2018

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