Why Does Deadly Junk Food Taste Good?

Mount Shasta, seen on Facebook, 6/3/2023:

A GOOD QUESTION

My friend, Tom Carterus, asks: So how does something that is so detrimental for your health taste so good? I know that chocolate-craving is a magnesium deficiency. When I supplement with the right kind of magnesium, my chocolate cravings go away and all chocolate tastes like wax to me.

Why do we like coke so much? I don’t drink the stuff now. But those adverts when I was growing up were great. The original coke bottle. Way cool.

So why does my body want to drink poison? The soda pop aisle at the grocery store has now expanded to three aisles. More and more and more.

When I was young and was mowing the grass, about the time I was

half-way done, my mom would come out and bring me a real coke in a real coke glass. She filled it with ice first. Then poured the coke over the ice cubes, to cool it. There would be about a 3/4″ foamy head on top just like a beer. That way you knew it was fresh!

And above the foam, as you drank, the little bubbles seemed to rise above the glass, and they’d tickle your nose. Out there in the hot summer day, I’d drink it down. And say, “Thanks, mom!”

Should I have said, “Thanks, mom, for poisoning me?”

So, why is my body craving, still, that I would drink poison, all the while thinking it’s the greatest drink on the planet?

I have patients that, when Coke offered the 99-cent liter-sized bottles, these folks would drink 5 or 6 of them each day. Over ice.

I’ve always wondered if they’re still alive.

They used to tell me it was cheaper to drink coke then water. 🙁

AN ANSWER

It took over 100,000 years to evolve these bodies. During most of that time, food was scarce, especially high-energy, fast-energy food. In fact, you could only get it from summer fruit or honey. Rare, indeed. And those humans who could, gobbled it up and grew fat, and this helped them survive the winter of little/no food.

The babies, conceived in spring and summer, were born in the cold months, and mama could make milk for them. Of course, the mamas who had failed to gobble enough high-energy food, and their babies, died. And the dead ones are not our ancestors. They left no descendants.

So our bodies evolved to tell us, with taste-buds and noses (our food-selector devices), that we should gobble that stuff up.

But now, the food manufacturers have made their products “addictive.” These tweaked “food-like products” are not true food that works for a human body, but more like a narcotic, which kills.

It won’t take another 100,000 years for our species to evolve. The poison-consumers are dying off and leaving damaged and weak progeny now. They’ll probably all be gone in less than even a thousand years.

That’s good news. Right?