Dox47 wrote:
Eh, our bodies haven't caught up with our economic prosperity yet, and still think that things like fat and sugar are scarce and should be consumed as often as possible.
Along those lines, this guy:
http://www.gnolls.org/2074/why-snack-fo ... ck-appeal/What we evolved to want:
Quote:
Modern Technology, Paleolithic Tastes
The key to understanding snack food is to understand what foods were available to us in the Paleolithic, so that we can understand what our tastes are for. It?s impossible to overdose on sour or bitter because they?re aversive in large doses, so that leaves us with sweet (which also helps detect fat), salty, and umami.
Let?s examine fat: there was no such thing as ?vegetable oil? (actually seed oil) in the Paleolithic. The only year-round source of dietary fat was animals, with nuts a secondary, seasonal source. Therefore, our taste for fat is primarily a taste for animal fat?including all the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K2-MK4) found in animal fat, and for which fat is necessary to absorb.
A wild banana. Small, starchy, and mostly seeds.
Sweetness was limited by lack of availability. Paleolithic fruits were much smaller and more bitter than modern varieties, which have been bred for sweetness and seedlessness to the point of being unable to reproduce without human help?and they would not have always been available at their peak of ripeness, as they?re eaten by many other animals too. Honey has always been rare. And as the Drs. Jaminet note, it is entirely possible that sweet taste receptors do double duty as animal fat detectors.
Salt was difficult to obtain, except for those who lived near the ocean. And as Parmesan cheese and kombu dashi hadn?t yet been created, umami was limited to its natural source?meat.
In conclusion, we can see that our taste receptors are primarily geared towards obtaining fatty meat and salt, with nuts and sweet fruit as occasional bonuses. So it?s not surprising that we enjoy salty, fatty meat and sweet fruits.
We now have the technology and economic abundance to get all those things in extreme. The family dinner in 1955 U.S. hit all those marks of fatty/salty/sweet/umami. It was a time of famous economic abundance and people ate up. By today's standards they ate things of astonishing unhealthiness. That family dinner would feature a hunk of fatty red meat with mashed potatoes swimming in butter and salt, butter on peas and apple pie for dessert. It would make a modern nutritionist faint with horror. But they weren't fat.
They had the economic prosperity to afford fat and sugar in abundance but they weren't fat. But we (speaking collectively, not this board) are. The link I put in is a guy with pages upon pages of explanation. Worth a click, I think. But here is where he blames snack culture, which has replaced the 3-squares culture that was prevalent in the past.
Quote:
The Magic Of Snacks, Part I: Taste Without Nutrition
Just as a movie set?s only constraint is to look good for a few seconds from a limited set of camera angles, a snack food?s only constraint is to taste good until it slides down your throat.
And that?s what technology allows us to do: create products (?snacks?) that tickle our taste receptors far more than real food can ever hope to?but that don?t come with the nutrition that selected us to crave those tastes in the first place.
This is the reason that the concept ?eat whole foods, minimally processed? is generally sound: if whole foods taste good to us, it?s most likely because they contain nutrients we need, not because they?ve been engineered to tickle our taste buds. (Note that all modern fruits are heavily engineered products of thousands of years of careful breeding: read Dan Koeppel?s fascinating book ?Banana? for a look at one typical example.)
12 Aug 2014, 10:27 pm
