What is food?
A simple question that everybody can answer.
Yet, the answers people give can be quite surprising.
Food can be fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy and even… a candy bar!
A candy bar is in essence super concentrated empty calories. But for some people it is food!
Why?!
Why, when we know that fruits and vegetables are best for us, do we eat processed foods?
What makes them so alluring?
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Why we crave calories
Any animal on this planet, including humans, wants to survive.
And that means eating enough calories to sustain its bodily functions.
[su_pullquote align=”right”]Read more on the topic: Why Fruits Are Small and Bitter in the Wild and What It Means for Your Health
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Calories, however, are hard to find in the natural world. Fruits are hard to find and animals are hard to catch.
What is more, fruits and vegetables in nature are not as big nor as sweet as the ones we buy in the supermarket. Wild animals are not fat but skinny.
In short, you need to eat a lot of bulk to feed yourself out in nature. And for humans, that bulk are fruits and vegetables.
That bulk you had to eat, just to survive, is abundant in fiber, phytonutrients, and antioxidants. You would have met your micronutrient needs simply by eating enough calories.
So you never needed to develop a taste for micronutrients.
What you developed a taste for are calories in the form of carbohydrates (sugars), fats and protein.
Hijacking our food evaluation mechanism
So, we need vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and phytonutrients to thrive just as much as we need calories.
Since we never developed a taste of the former, our food does not taste better if it has more micronutrients in it.
Food is great if it has a lot of fat or sugar, though.
So, naturally, we invented ways to make the food taste better by removing anything but the fat and sugar.
A croissant. A candy bar. Ice-cream. French fries with ketchup.
All super sweet, all fatty.
Adding salt
Yes, we put salt even in the sweet ‘foods’.
Salt is vital for our survival and hard to find in nature.
We love it. We crave it.
That’s why all cooks say that it brings out the other flavors in the food.
It does, indeed… simply make the food even more unnatural but tasty.
A simple recipe for bad health
Salt, fat, and sugar are the three main ingredients in processed junk foods (apart from the preservatives, of course).
They have many names and that’s why its hard to understand what the ingredients label of your candy bar actually means.
The recipe cannot be simpler.
Remove everything from the natural foods.
Add salt, sugar, fat, artificial flavoring and some other chemicals and you have the most alluring foods extant!
They hijack your system and have almost drug-like addictive effect on you.
Stay true to nature
Whole plant foods have they calories ‘diluted’ with fiber, antioxidants, vitamins, and many micronutrients.
Manknown or not even yet discovered.
Natural foods have it all the nutrition we need and, truth be told, can taste way better than any processed junk. Not because they are artificially engineered to taste great but because we were engineered by nature to love them.
Take a look at our Recipe section and try what a healthy and tasty food can do for your health and taste buds (if you haven’t already)!
In any case, always, seek health consciously.
