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Give a newborn baby a single drop of sugar water, and their little face relaxes, almost into a smile. Give them something bitter, and they frown right away. Nobody taught them that. Loving sweet, fatty and salty food is something we're born with. But here's the question: why would the body love the very things that are bad for it? Let's go back a very long time. No supermarkets, no food delivery. You had to find your food, dig it up, or hunt it. Many days, people went hungry.
Back then, sweet wild fruit, honey and fatty meat were rare treasures. One small bite gave you a big boost of energy. That energy is what we call calories. Whoever loved these foods more was better at surviving the hungry times, living on, and having children. And so that love was passed down, generation after generation, to today. Today, the Hadza people of Tanzania in Africa still live by hunting and gathering. Ask them to rank their foods, and number one is honey.
But the world has changed. Sweetness you once had to climb a tall tree for, you can now buy a few steps away. The body hasn't caught up. It still thinks there's a famine outside. We also learned to combine sugar, fat and salt. Wild fruit is sweet, but not fatty. Meat is rich, but not sweet. Cake and ice cream are sweet and fatty. Fries are fatty and salty. Those are the foods that are hardest to stop eating. American scientists ran an experiment. Twenty people lived in a research center for four weeks, eating as much as they liked. In the two weeks of heavily processed food, each person ate 508 extra calories a day, and gained about two pounds.
There's also a common myth. Some say a craving means your body is missing something. Craving chocolate means you need magnesium. But if you really needed magnesium, you'd crave spinach and nuts. Most scientists say there's no evidence for this idea. A lot of cravings are actually learned. In the US, four in ten women say they crave chocolate before their period. In Spain, fewer than one in ten say so. Cravings can be triggered by lots of things. A delicious smell, an ad, feeling stressed, being bored, or just snacking at the same time every day.
So your body isn't out to get you. It's like an old friend who still remembers the hard times of tens of thousands of years ago. Next time a craving hits, ask yourself: am I really hungry, or is that old friend calling out again?
Your body isn't after “unhealthy.” It wants food that packs a lot of energy into one bite. When food was scarce, that instinct kept people alive.
Put simply: the world changed fast, and the body still plays by the old rules.
In that study, both diets offered the same amounts of sugar, fat and salt, and people could eat as much as they liked. On processed food, they simply ate more.
Many cravings are learned. Women who, asked when they crave chocolate, brought up “before my period” on their own:
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