Super-stimulus foods are ether very sugary or very salty. Pizza is neither.
I don’t think this is at all accurate as a generalization. Insofar as any food can be said to qualify as a superstimulus, some of the best contenders are savory foods which are high in fats and starches, which in our ancestral environment would have been valuable sources of calories, calorie overabundance being far too rare a problem for us to be evolutionarily prepared against.
Peanut butter is a good example of a food which would have been an extreme outlier in terms of nutrient density in our ancestral environment (not for nothing is it the main ingredient in a therapeutic food to restore bodily health to people afflicted by famine) which is extremely moreish, despite not being especially high in either sugar or salt. Cheese is a similar case.
Peanut butter is a good example of a food which would have been an extreme outlier in terms of nutrient density in our ancestral environment
Not an outlier at all. Paleo hunter-gatherers certainly ate nuts. And meat (not the lean muscle meat, but the whole-animal meat including organs and fat) is probably higher in nutrient density.
Nuts would have been one of the richest sources of macronutrients by density in our ancestral environment, and they wouldn’t have been available in great quantity, which is probably in large part why they’re such an addictive food.
(My girlfriend has a nut allergy, and since I’ve started having to keep track of nut content in foods, I’ve noticed that the “snack” aisles in grocery stores can be divided, with fairly little remainder, into chips, pretzels, and nut-based foods.)
Liver is higher in micronutrients than nuts, or just about anything else for that matter, and I suspect that it avoids being a superstimulus to our senses because it would be one of the few food sources in our ancestral environment that it’s actually possible to get a nutrient overdose on (many species’ livers contain toxic concentrations of vitamins, not to mention the various toxins it’s filtered out of its host’s blood.) In terms of macronutrients, nuts have a higher calorie concentration than any animal tissue other than lard (a cut of flesh which is as calorie dense as nuts would have to be about two thirds fat by weight.)
Lard of course is not known for being a very tasty food on its own (it’s also very incomplete nutrition,) but is used extensively in cooking foods which people have a pronounced tendency to overeat.
I don’t think this is at all accurate as a generalization. Insofar as any food can be said to qualify as a superstimulus, some of the best contenders are savory foods which are high in fats and starches, which in our ancestral environment would have been valuable sources of calories, calorie overabundance being far too rare a problem for us to be evolutionarily prepared against.
Peanut butter is a good example of a food which would have been an extreme outlier in terms of nutrient density in our ancestral environment (not for nothing is it the main ingredient in a therapeutic food to restore bodily health to people afflicted by famine) which is extremely moreish, despite not being especially high in either sugar or salt. Cheese is a similar case.
Not an outlier at all. Paleo hunter-gatherers certainly ate nuts. And meat (not the lean muscle meat, but the whole-animal meat including organs and fat) is probably higher in nutrient density.
Nuts would have been one of the richest sources of macronutrients by density in our ancestral environment, and they wouldn’t have been available in great quantity, which is probably in large part why they’re such an addictive food.
(My girlfriend has a nut allergy, and since I’ve started having to keep track of nut content in foods, I’ve noticed that the “snack” aisles in grocery stores can be divided, with fairly little remainder, into chips, pretzels, and nut-based foods.)
Liver is higher in micronutrients than nuts, or just about anything else for that matter, and I suspect that it avoids being a superstimulus to our senses because it would be one of the few food sources in our ancestral environment that it’s actually possible to get a nutrient overdose on (many species’ livers contain toxic concentrations of vitamins, not to mention the various toxins it’s filtered out of its host’s blood.) In terms of macronutrients, nuts have a higher calorie concentration than any animal tissue other than lard (a cut of flesh which is as calorie dense as nuts would have to be about two thirds fat by weight.)
Lard of course is not known for being a very tasty food on its own (it’s also very incomplete nutrition,) but is used extensively in cooking foods which people have a pronounced tendency to overeat.
It can be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lardo and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salo_(food).