Empirical observation: healthy foods often taste bad.
Why do my taste buds like fat and sugar, instead of a vegetable smoothies? Here’s my half-serious attempt at applying formal reasoning to explain the phenomenon.
Proposition. At a food consumption equilibrium, all healthy foods have significant downsides (tastiness, price, ease of preparation, etc.).
Proof. We say that a food is “healthy” if the average person would benefit from eating more of it.
Consider an arbitrary food X which doesn’t have significant downsides.
We assume that food consumption is at an equilibrium, such that the better a food’s overall profile, the more of it people will choose to eat.
Any food is toxic (i.e., not healthy) in large enough quantities, which means the equilibrium consumption is finite. In particular, the average consumption of food X is at a finite equilibrium.
However, food X was assumed to have no significant downsides. So if it was healthy, people would eat more of it. But on the contrary, X is at an equilibrium. Hence, food X cannot be healthy.
QED
As an example, take salt. Salt is necessary for human survival. And it tastes good! But now most people eat too much of it, so it’s generally considered unhealthy.
I think the weakest point of my proof is the “food consumption equilibrium” assumption, and the non-standard definition of “healthy” foods. But the subject didn’t originally seem mathable at all, so I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
Some of this selection has taken place through natural selection: wild animals choosing to eat fruits they find tasty (and disperse their seeds). In this case, because the animal consumer is also evolving, it’s likely to end up favoring (and thus propagating) fruits that are actually nutritious too. After all, an animal that chose to eat foods that were bad for it, would be less likely to survive and prosper. So wild animals’ tastes and their food plants’ properties coevolve into something resembling an equilibrium, where the fruits are adequately tasty and nutritious.
But once modern humans come on the scene, artificial selection takes over — and once industrial capitalism arises, that selection is accelerated massively. To have a profitable food industry, the foremost goal of selection is not nutrition but rather marketability: being able to sell the food to other humans. This selection process runs much faster than the evolution of taste. So we end up inventing candy, cake, cocktails, and other hyperpalatable foods that are “bad for us” but sell well because they’re tasty. We breed fruits to be big and sweet, and then we squeeze them for sugary juice and discard the fiber.
(And poky slow evolution doesn’t breed out our taste for sweets, because candy isn’t so bad for us that it kills everyone who eats it right away.)
Empirical observation: healthy foods often taste bad.
Why do my taste buds like fat and sugar, instead of a vegetable smoothies? Here’s my half-serious attempt at applying formal reasoning to explain the phenomenon.
Proposition.
At a food consumption equilibrium, all healthy foods have significant downsides (tastiness, price, ease of preparation, etc.).
Proof.
We say that a food is “healthy” if the average person would benefit from eating more of it.
Consider an arbitrary food X which doesn’t have significant downsides.
We assume that food consumption is at an equilibrium, such that the better a food’s overall profile, the more of it people will choose to eat.
Any food is toxic (i.e., not healthy) in large enough quantities, which means the equilibrium consumption is finite. In particular, the average consumption of food X is at a finite equilibrium.
However, food X was assumed to have no significant downsides. So if it was healthy, people would eat more of it. But on the contrary, X is at an equilibrium. Hence, food X cannot be healthy.
QED
As an example, take salt. Salt is necessary for human survival. And it tastes good! But now most people eat too much of it, so it’s generally considered unhealthy.
I think the weakest point of my proof is the “food consumption equilibrium” assumption, and the non-standard definition of “healthy” foods. But the subject didn’t originally seem mathable at all, so I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
Many foods have been selected for palatability.
Some of this selection has taken place through natural selection: wild animals choosing to eat fruits they find tasty (and disperse their seeds). In this case, because the animal consumer is also evolving, it’s likely to end up favoring (and thus propagating) fruits that are actually nutritious too. After all, an animal that chose to eat foods that were bad for it, would be less likely to survive and prosper. So wild animals’ tastes and their food plants’ properties coevolve into something resembling an equilibrium, where the fruits are adequately tasty and nutritious.
But once modern humans come on the scene, artificial selection takes over — and once industrial capitalism arises, that selection is accelerated massively. To have a profitable food industry, the foremost goal of selection is not nutrition but rather marketability: being able to sell the food to other humans. This selection process runs much faster than the evolution of taste. So we end up inventing candy, cake, cocktails, and other hyperpalatable foods that are “bad for us” but sell well because they’re tasty. We breed fruits to be big and sweet, and then we squeeze them for sugary juice and discard the fiber.
(And poky slow evolution doesn’t breed out our taste for sweets, because candy isn’t so bad for us that it kills everyone who eats it right away.)