What causes our food preferences/weaknesses?

Morgaine_on_the_move
Morgaine_on_the_move Posts: 228 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I've been thinking about this. Last night I had some mexican food and a margarita with friends at a potluck. I only took a few sips of the margarita, barely making a dent in it, even though it was very good. I just knew that it wasn't good for me and it wasn't worth the calories. I had no trouble pushing it away. However, I later ate a heaping serving of a dessert someone had made filled with sugar, butter and white flour. Why can I say, "No, that's enough" to alcohol but find it harder to do with desserts? I can also say "no" to french fries, soft drinks and chips, but if chocolate enters my house...watch out...
I know other people are the opposite and have trouble turning down alcohol and french fries but they don't care much about sweets. So, my question is, what makes a particular food or beverage so appealing--more like insidiously beguiling-- to us? Is it a learned behavior? Brain chemistry? Taste buds?

Replies

  • nuclearbanana
    nuclearbanana Posts: 31
    As explained to be by a weirdly enlightened bioarchaeologist/anthropologist, I could have missing/erroneous information. I suggest you look into the topic yourself!

    As you look back into human evolution, you will quickly learn that hominids have had the hunter-gatherer method of finding food starting back nearly two million years ago and ending ~10,000 years ago. All of this began with the homo erectus. Now, that's quite a long time for evolution to have its influence on a hominid's tastes for foods, specifically salty, fatty things (animal meat) and sweet things (roots, veggies, fruits, etc). Why so? Because of the serious energy you get out of these foods, and the amount of energy these fellows were expending every single day trying to find food, reproduce and think.

    IIRC, the varied diet and use of fire by the homo erectus (THOSE MANDIBLES/TEETH) paved the road for said hominids to develop a larger and more efficiently thinking cranium. We have quite massive brains for our size , and brains typically run on glucose, and brains are big energy consumers, and as such, we crave it because without the craving why would we bother?

    Basically, we crave sugar so damn much because human evolution required us to sustain the resource intensive, massive brains we eventually developed.
  • Morgaine_on_the_move
    Morgaine_on_the_move Posts: 228 Member
    Right, yes, I've heard this and it makes sense! I guess the more specific question for me is, why do I, as an individual, crave SOME fatty/sweet types of foods, but not all of them? Like I said, I could have taken or left the super sweet margarita, but the dessert later was really what I couldn't pass up.

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