Because humans are genetically wired to slightly overeat, in anticipation of future periods where they will be under high calorie demand (e.g. the weekly persistence hunt in which you would run a marathon to catch a prey animal) or forced to undereat (the cold or dry season, when there is no food), so they will have stores, and perishable food does not go to waste. You’d gorge yourself on fruit and nuts and slaughtered animals in fall, when lots are available, because in winter, there would be slim pickings.
But nowadays, we don’t run into periods where we have to undereat for lack of food, so those stores just keep on building. Around Christmas, you should, based on evolutionary history, be getting pretty damn hungry. Instead, we are drowning in chocolate and meat. Nor do most of us run a weekly marathon, or walk an average of 30.000 steps a day, or climb a couple trees and dig out a bunch of roots and carry baskets full of berries each day. We drive our cars and sit in front of our desks.
Also because we are also genetically wired to be hungry enough to go to the trouble of finding and prepping food—but both those things are trivial nowadays. - Yesterday, we made a traditional food: chestnuts. Quite trivial to prep and harvest, as historic foods go, I didn’t have to dig through dirt, or walk down an impala, or fight a hive of bees after climbing up a huge tree. We just walked outside in the rain, and picked chestnuts between the spiky balls, until we got annoyed and headed home, figuring they were enough, because we were cold. Then we washed them, roasted them (on an instant fire, we didn’t even have to collect firewood), and ate them, while peeling them one at a time. They are tasty, but peeling them is annoying and fiddly. Eventually, you aren’t quite full, but you are too annoyed to carry on peeling, let alone walk out again in the rain to get more. When I went to sleep, there were still a bunch of chestnuts on the table. I finished them for breakfast, and it took me a while.
If, instead, I had just taken a pizza from the freezer, popped it in the oven, and shoved it in my face, I am sure I’d have eaten my fill.
And finally, because our food is highly processed to be tastier than it should be, and less filling than it should be, and faster to consume than it should be. Even our healthy food—we puree our fruit and veg into smoothies, so something we would have previously chewed for an hour can now be gulped down. Things that previously would have filled us up are now bereft of fibre. Things previously digested slowly are now digested instantly, so we are hungry again a few hours later. Eaten and digesting used to take time. Now, you gulp down, and then, you could do with another snack. Kids used to get mandarins and nuts in their Christmas stockings. Now, they get candy.
The other week, I had the flu. I didn’t feel like eating, but knew I should. So I did make a deep frozen pizza. It was so delicious, and so easy to eat, that a thousand calories just slipped down. And then, a couple hours later, I was hungry again. I had tricked my body into overeating effortlessly.
Overeating yourself to obesity used to be really, really difficult. You wouldn’t have the amount of food available; all obesity related diseases used to be diseases of the very, very rich. And even if you did have the food available, the volume you needed to fit inside yourself, the time you needed to chew… it would have been crazy. There have been cultures that fed people to obesity, using natural whole foods, and it was really hard. They kept throwing up from the liters and liters of milk they had to drink, and still ended up skinnier than your typical American superfat—like, look at pics of the poor girls forced through Leblouh.They basically had a full-time job of eating and taking naps, just from how long it took to get it all down and process it, and they still get nowhere near what many Americans achieve without effort.
You basically need someone to process the food for you so that its volume and nutrients and fibre are reduced, all tricking your body into thinking it has barely eaten, while keeping the calories high, and keeping it tasty. Breeding a grainy grass into a cultivar high in starch, then processing the result and sieving it until all the fibre is gone. Extracting the oils from plants and milks and enriching foods with them through frying. Crushing the fruit, and then filtering out the fibre.
From your stomach’s perspective, the idea that something as small as a donut could possibly contain enough calories for a lunch seems ludicrous. From your pancreas perspective, your blood sugar has dropped again, because it all entered at once and was pulled out in the insulin overreaction that provoked, ergo there is not enough blood sugar and you should eat more. From your intestines perspective, you are still low on protein, vitamins, minerals, omega 3, and anyway, you are done digesting. So of course it all signals that you should eat more, and when you don’t, you get hungry and grumpy.
Our bodies hunger cues developed for a very different world than the one we live in.
But grow/gather/hunt and process from scratch your own food, eat whole foods, and be physically active… and you will look exactly like people hundreds of years ago, and without feeling like your have to force yourself to refrain from overeating.
You are right on the obesity + malnutrition thing, though. But I think that is not about potassium—potassium is just a good stand in, because it is so abundant in most vegetables.
You can eat yourself to morbid obesity, and yet be so deficient in folate (something crammed in vegetables and organ meats and wholegrains, all huge parts of historic diets that are now neglected) that your fetus during pregnancy gets a spinal deformity (spina bifida). It is common enough that we give pregnant women b vitamin supplements as a default nowadays; yet if it had been common historically, humans would hardly be unable to generate folate. It is crazy to me that we live in a rich nation, and yet we have to give people pills so their fetuses don’t develop severe disease from malnutrition.
I’ve known a bunch of obese people who give compelling accounts of being absolutely ravenous. And I think that is one part that their blood sugar is heywire (prediabetic), one part bad habits they are conditioned too… but another the fact that, despite drowning in calories, they are starving. And the tricky thing here is that your bodies cravings have become useless. I’ve seen obese people describe cravings for sour things—and then they eat sour candy. And I think… your body is probably seeking vitamins, and minerals you need vitamin c to absorb, like iron, and hence trying to direct you to fruit and ferments. And then sour candy seems like a hyperstimulus for that… but it totally lacks the thing you are looking for. They crave salty foods, because they crave minerals; but the only mineral in the processed food they get is sodium. They crave crunchyness and popping sensations, because our bodies associate them with ripeness, and hence, maximum density of vitamins; but they are just eating empty calories. I think this is one of the reasons making obese people eat heaps of vegetables and protein and fish oil often helps—their nutrient needs are actually met, so their drive to overeat goes down. You can get all your protein from pasta, but by the time you do, you have also massively overeaten on calories.
A lot of the crap sold in our supermarkets simply is not food. It does not give you the things your body needs. It does not keep you healthy. It does not make you happy. It starves your microbiome. It pushes your body fat to unhealthy levels, while leaving you nutrient deprived. It has been processed until most of its nutrients are gone, while lots of stuff has been added that your body would never have naturally encountered and certainly does not require. It confuses the hell out of all the systems in you that have evolved to judge how much you still need to eat. It is basically a obesogenic wrapped in a hyperstimulus, with a bonus for giving you cancer, diabetes, broken digestion, hormone disruption and dementia. The fact that this plastic wrapped shit can be advertised to children and placed near the cash desk as a trap, priced to outcompete real food and prey on poor people, described in ways that mislead consumers into thinking it is healthy and happiness promoting, all while putting massive stress on the average person and having ads tell them that this garbage is somehow integral to dealing with their emotions, spending time with friends, having celebrations and keeping their children happy, only to then blame the consumer for “lacking the willpower” to stay slim… it makes me furious. Our society incentivises obesity, and then shames obese people, and then tries to sell them artificial cures that would not be necessary if this system wasn’t broken, and often does not even work.
Because humans are genetically wired to slightly overeat, in anticipation of future periods where they will be under high calorie demand (e.g. the weekly persistence hunt in which you would run a marathon to catch a prey animal) or forced to undereat (the cold or dry season, when there is no food), so they will have stores, and perishable food does not go to waste. You’d gorge yourself on fruit and nuts and slaughtered animals in fall, when lots are available, because in winter, there would be slim pickings.
But nowadays, we don’t run into periods where we have to undereat for lack of food, so those stores just keep on building. Around Christmas, you should, based on evolutionary history, be getting pretty damn hungry. Instead, we are drowning in chocolate and meat. Nor do most of us run a weekly marathon, or walk an average of 30.000 steps a day, or climb a couple trees and dig out a bunch of roots and carry baskets full of berries each day. We drive our cars and sit in front of our desks.
Also because we are also genetically wired to be hungry enough to go to the trouble of finding and prepping food—but both those things are trivial nowadays. - Yesterday, we made a traditional food: chestnuts. Quite trivial to prep and harvest, as historic foods go, I didn’t have to dig through dirt, or walk down an impala, or fight a hive of bees after climbing up a huge tree. We just walked outside in the rain, and picked chestnuts between the spiky balls, until we got annoyed and headed home, figuring they were enough, because we were cold. Then we washed them, roasted them (on an instant fire, we didn’t even have to collect firewood), and ate them, while peeling them one at a time. They are tasty, but peeling them is annoying and fiddly. Eventually, you aren’t quite full, but you are too annoyed to carry on peeling, let alone walk out again in the rain to get more. When I went to sleep, there were still a bunch of chestnuts on the table. I finished them for breakfast, and it took me a while.
If, instead, I had just taken a pizza from the freezer, popped it in the oven, and shoved it in my face, I am sure I’d have eaten my fill.
And finally, because our food is highly processed to be tastier than it should be, and less filling than it should be, and faster to consume than it should be. Even our healthy food—we puree our fruit and veg into smoothies, so something we would have previously chewed for an hour can now be gulped down. Things that previously would have filled us up are now bereft of fibre. Things previously digested slowly are now digested instantly, so we are hungry again a few hours later. Eaten and digesting used to take time. Now, you gulp down, and then, you could do with another snack. Kids used to get mandarins and nuts in their Christmas stockings. Now, they get candy.
The other week, I had the flu. I didn’t feel like eating, but knew I should. So I did make a deep frozen pizza. It was so delicious, and so easy to eat, that a thousand calories just slipped down. And then, a couple hours later, I was hungry again. I had tricked my body into overeating effortlessly.
Overeating yourself to obesity used to be really, really difficult. You wouldn’t have the amount of food available; all obesity related diseases used to be diseases of the very, very rich. And even if you did have the food available, the volume you needed to fit inside yourself, the time you needed to chew… it would have been crazy. There have been cultures that fed people to obesity, using natural whole foods, and it was really hard. They kept throwing up from the liters and liters of milk they had to drink, and still ended up skinnier than your typical American superfat—like, look at pics of the poor girls forced through Leblouh.They basically had a full-time job of eating and taking naps, just from how long it took to get it all down and process it, and they still get nowhere near what many Americans achieve without effort.
You basically need someone to process the food for you so that its volume and nutrients and fibre are reduced, all tricking your body into thinking it has barely eaten, while keeping the calories high, and keeping it tasty. Breeding a grainy grass into a cultivar high in starch, then processing the result and sieving it until all the fibre is gone. Extracting the oils from plants and milks and enriching foods with them through frying. Crushing the fruit, and then filtering out the fibre.
From your stomach’s perspective, the idea that something as small as a donut could possibly contain enough calories for a lunch seems ludicrous. From your pancreas perspective, your blood sugar has dropped again, because it all entered at once and was pulled out in the insulin overreaction that provoked, ergo there is not enough blood sugar and you should eat more. From your intestines perspective, you are still low on protein, vitamins, minerals, omega 3, and anyway, you are done digesting. So of course it all signals that you should eat more, and when you don’t, you get hungry and grumpy.
Our bodies hunger cues developed for a very different world than the one we live in.
But grow/gather/hunt and process from scratch your own food, eat whole foods, and be physically active… and you will look exactly like people hundreds of years ago, and without feeling like your have to force yourself to refrain from overeating.
You are right on the obesity + malnutrition thing, though. But I think that is not about potassium—potassium is just a good stand in, because it is so abundant in most vegetables.
You can eat yourself to morbid obesity, and yet be so deficient in folate (something crammed in vegetables and organ meats and wholegrains, all huge parts of historic diets that are now neglected) that your fetus during pregnancy gets a spinal deformity (spina bifida). It is common enough that we give pregnant women b vitamin supplements as a default nowadays; yet if it had been common historically, humans would hardly be unable to generate folate. It is crazy to me that we live in a rich nation, and yet we have to give people pills so their fetuses don’t develop severe disease from malnutrition.
I’ve known a bunch of obese people who give compelling accounts of being absolutely ravenous. And I think that is one part that their blood sugar is heywire (prediabetic), one part bad habits they are conditioned too… but another the fact that, despite drowning in calories, they are starving. And the tricky thing here is that your bodies cravings have become useless. I’ve seen obese people describe cravings for sour things—and then they eat sour candy. And I think… your body is probably seeking vitamins, and minerals you need vitamin c to absorb, like iron, and hence trying to direct you to fruit and ferments. And then sour candy seems like a hyperstimulus for that… but it totally lacks the thing you are looking for. They crave salty foods, because they crave minerals; but the only mineral in the processed food they get is sodium. They crave crunchyness and popping sensations, because our bodies associate them with ripeness, and hence, maximum density of vitamins; but they are just eating empty calories. I think this is one of the reasons making obese people eat heaps of vegetables and protein and fish oil often helps—their nutrient needs are actually met, so their drive to overeat goes down. You can get all your protein from pasta, but by the time you do, you have also massively overeaten on calories.
A lot of the crap sold in our supermarkets simply is not food. It does not give you the things your body needs. It does not keep you healthy. It does not make you happy. It starves your microbiome. It pushes your body fat to unhealthy levels, while leaving you nutrient deprived. It has been processed until most of its nutrients are gone, while lots of stuff has been added that your body would never have naturally encountered and certainly does not require. It confuses the hell out of all the systems in you that have evolved to judge how much you still need to eat. It is basically a obesogenic wrapped in a hyperstimulus, with a bonus for giving you cancer, diabetes, broken digestion, hormone disruption and dementia. The fact that this plastic wrapped shit can be advertised to children and placed near the cash desk as a trap, priced to outcompete real food and prey on poor people, described in ways that mislead consumers into thinking it is healthy and happiness promoting, all while putting massive stress on the average person and having ads tell them that this garbage is somehow integral to dealing with their emotions, spending time with friends, having celebrations and keeping their children happy, only to then blame the consumer for “lacking the willpower” to stay slim… it makes me furious. Our society incentivises obesity, and then shames obese people, and then tries to sell them artificial cures that would not be necessary if this system wasn’t broken, and often does not even work.
Ya, all that sounds about right to me :) Thanks for writing out so clearly :)