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Sugar, salt and fats taste good because our bodies have evolved to favour foods containing those items. For hundreds of thousands of years, finding enough nutrition was a challenge for early humans, so we've evolved to favour foods that have higher caloric density. If you're an early human who is starving and you find some lettuce and a fruit, you're better off eating the fruit first because it has more sugar and calories.

In the last 2-3 generations (which is a blink of an eye in the evolutionary scale), we all have enough food and calories but our brain chemistry still favours fats and sugar.

right. Eat while the eating is good. Not eating enough is an evolutionary hazard which means you cannot propagate offspring, but eating too much is not an evolutionary hazard at all. You can eat way too much and still have offspring, it's only much later in life that it becomes a problem.

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WYM the ladder?

The latter

2 generations is 1970. The industrialization of food in the 1800s is where it shifted.

They mean the latter, which means the later of multiple options given.

This pairs with the reality that even our fairly recent ancestors had limited access to those nutrients. Honey required getting past bees, wild fruits were small and tart, salt was irregularly available, and fat had to be hunted down and killed. The idea of constant availability of as much fat/sugar/salt as you want, in as many varieties as you can imagine, didn't apply.

Furthermore, the consequences are limited on the time scale that affects natural selection. Humans can reproduce by their teens and raise the child to reproductive age by their 30s, long before obesity is likely to kill you.

Because for like 99.9999% of evolutionary history, calories were scarce and unpredictable. You were WAY more likely to die of starvation (due to sickness, drought, winter, injury) than somehow finding so many calories that you got fat. So we all evolved the strategy: "when you do find a high-cal food source, eat as much as possible!!" And in those calorie-scarce times, (aka essentially all of human history!) that was a great strategy to have. It kept your ancestors alive.

Calories becoming cheap and abundant for everyday normal people happened in the last ~200 years, which is a split second on the evolution timescale. There just hasn't been anywhere near enough time to adapt to this yet. So we're all still running the "eat as many calories as you can find" program in our brains because that worked great for like a million years and has only needed the "but not too much" asterisk for a tiny amount of time since then.

The latter

A ladder is a thing with rungs you climb to reach high places.

> Sugar, salt and fats taste good

and are in themselves not "unhealthy", too much i.e. more than you need is unhealthy

Plenty of healthy food is delicious. The unhealthy food is just relies on a trio of inexpensive macronutrients: Sugar, Fat, Salt.

Ah, a r/boneappletea

"Unhealthy" foods are generally very high in fat, sugar, and starches. In other words, they are full of energy. That's not necessarily great when you eat a lot of that food and don't exercise much. But in the past, energy-rich food was scarce and very valuable to survival. So our bodies crave it and get a big rush of happy brain chemicals when we eat it. Evolutionarily, "unhealthy" food was actually really healthy food if you could get your hands on it - again, because it was usually in small amounts and really gave you a survival benefit.

I didn’t think this cut it as a top level answer, but for OP or anyone else curious, there is a term you can google, “hyperpalatable”. These are foods which are engineered to get you to eat way more of than you need, and to be addictive in a way. Everything at an Applebees is hyperpalatable. Doritos are hyperpalatable. Etc.

>Because for like 99.9999% of evolutionary history, calories were scarce and unpredictable. You were WAY more likely to die of starvation (due to sickness, drought, winter, injury) than somehow finding so many calories that you got fat. So we all evolved the strategy: "when you do find a high-cal food source, eat as much as possible!!" And in those calorie-scarce times, (aka essentially all of human history!) that was a great strategy to have. It kept your ancestors alive.

Also we have the "turn those excess calories into fat, you might need it later!" strategy - hence we get fat.

Because for 100s of thousands of years our ancestors died of all kinds of other causes before they could get fat in addition to having a calorie deficient diet.

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Yes and no, depending on what we're talking about. I was referring to abundance of high calorie foods. Firstly, the industrialisation you mention only applies to certain societies and wasn't the case for many developing countries until very recently.

Secondly, even in developing countries, it only applied to certain classes. In the 19th century, famine was not uncommon in Europe. Ireland famously lost 10% of its population in the mid-19th century during the potato famines. If you look at photos from the 1920s or 30s, the vast majority of people were lean and food was not plentiful for farmers and labourers. Many European countries had food rationing on certain items (like sugar) after both world wars i.e. into the 1950s.

It's only since then that we've had this glut of reliable food, no major (global) wars, jobs becoming less physical and so on. And that's when the obesity rates spiked, and not before these 2-3 generations.

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It's definitely a sad coincidence that some of the most delicious foods can be bad for our bodies. Still, it's worth it to enjoy them in moderation!

I worked with a child who was literally starving to death and couldn't eat for more than a minute a day (complicated reasons, parents refused tube feeding and courts were siding with the parents, at least temporarily.).

The medical advice was to feed the highest calorie creamy dessert we could find to get the most calories inside her in the shortest time.

We're hardcoded to enjoy eating stuff with too much sugar, salt and fat because thousands of years ago those foods were not that common and our body requires them.

Now they are way too common, but our bodies still crave them.

Also, foods with high amounts of sugar, salt, and fat aren’t “unhealthy”. We need all the to live. It’s more to do with the quantity.

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You’re making a bad assumption. There is no such this as good or bad food. Period.

What there is are good and bad choices pertaining to food. It’s more math based than anything. If you have 2000 calories a day in your food budget, and you are going to bed eating only 1400 calories, 600 calories of ice cream is a good choice because your body is under calorie and fat requirement for the day. If you’re already at 2200 calories for the day, an organic whole grain avocado sandwich with extra virgin oil and organic apples is a bad choice and will cause weight gain because you’re over budget.

High calorie foods taste good because evolution wise they help us survive better. 99.9% of human history people were malnourished, and high calorie high fat foods meant survival.

if it fits your macros is a science and math based “diet”

So, you telling that when I eat three burguers in a row im just following mother nature? Interesting

To be fair, even in the modern world, there are still many situations where a person may loose access to needed calories. For example, you go out for a bike ride, get hit by a car and end up in hospital. It may be days or in rarer cases weeks before you even eat a substantial meal again. Yes you may be given nutrients and fluids artificially, but not to the degree that we get from eating. Weight loss in hospital stay is incredibly common. There are other scenarios too where someone may need fat to survive.