It’s science, I don’t know the specifics of craving but I know they spent a lot of money to figure out how give you that feeling.
The same reason people will logically understand that crack is bad for them but crave it like crack
This is actually shockingly remarkably true.
There is very little to differentiate your addiction to junk food and your addiction to sex or your addiction to crack rock.
No no, they’re much different. It’s totally legal to be addicted to McDonald’s and sex.
You crave salt and fat because your body needs a little bit of these things to survive, but finding salt and fat out in nature is really really hard, so those cavemen that liked the taste of salty or fatty foods enough to make the extra effort to find those foods were more likely to survive to be your ancestors and you inherited that behaviour. That’s why you like McDonald’s, it’s full of the salt and fat that is hard to obtain if your diet consists of mostly roots and mushrooms and leaves.
McDonalds is bad for you because it’s unnaturally full of salt and fat. Far, far more than your body needs and far more than your cavemen ancestors would have eaten naturally. Especially if you eat McDonald’s often. Too much of anything turns that thing into a poison.
McDonald’s has only been around a generation or two. That’s not enough time for the people who crave McDonalds and eat too much of it to die off, leaving mostly people who don’t crave McDonalds to remain.
Don’t forget the big one, carbs. Carbohydrates are fairly hard to find in nature, even if you have a carnivorous diet and you get plenty of fat and proteins, you will desperately crave carbohydrates which are easier for the body to convert to energy than just fat by itself, and most animals were pretty lean so you would be very lucky to even get a lot of fat in your diet to begin with. If you just eat lean meat you will die.
Fruit, starchy tubers, honey and other natural sugars were prized sources of energy, this is why we love sweets so much and why a package of oily french fries feels like heaven, you are responding to natural imperatives that still think you’re at risk of starving.
As others have mentioned, dense carbohydrates and sugar are also attractive for the same reason.
Even more attractive is a combination of carbs and fat in the same food - which almost never occurs in nature.
They would have to die off before they reproduce
Yah this is important, there is no real such thing as “natural” selection anymore.
There is still selection happening but it’s wildly more complicated than nature alone and likely will take much, much longer to show effects, because we have reshaped the world to provide for us and can safely breed even with health conditions and bad habits.
There is a chemical in your brain called dopamine which is an important part of how we feel pleasure. Use of recreational drugs and alcohol causes a rush of this chemical and that is part of the pleasure we feel from using them. The problem is that regular use of such chemicals causes us to have lower levels of dopamine when we are not using them. We end up feeling a desire for the drug or booze to get our dopamine levels back up.
Diets high in sugar, salt, and carbs also causes a dopamine rush. When you eat that food regularly, it lowers your normal dopamine levels, just like drugs and alcohol do, if not to the same level. That is why you feel that craving. Eating such food occasionally is fine, but if you do it to often, you can literally get an addiction to it.
Edit to add -
You mentioned that fast foods are low quality and bad for you. That is true, but but only in high quantities. Fats and sugars were high value foods to our ancient ancestors. Fats are very high source of energy. You get more than twice the energy from a gram of fat than you get from a gram of carbohydrates or protein. Sugars are easily digested making them a source of quick energy compared to other carbs, fats, or proteins. Eating these kinds of foods gave us a survival advantage over those who didn’t, at least until we learned the agricultural skills to make them easy to acquire. Now, many or most people can get such foods any time they want and though they no longer give us an advantage, and eating a lot of them is actually harmful in the long run, those ancient taste preferences still remain in our evolved programing.
We evolved for a life of scarcity, but now we live in a world of plenty.
based middle of the road, analytical, truthful and realistic take.
Came here to post this and found it already +1 to this being one of the main reason it’s causing cravings.
If you want further reading look up information on the pleasure - reward circuitry in the brain.
Grease, sugar, and a lot of chemicals.
Everything is a chemical
Don’t forget loads of salt!
Like-- every step of the way, fast food places have an opportunity to aim for ‘healthier’ or ‘more delicious’ choices, overwhelmingly with profit-making in mind. That’s the main thing to keep in mind.
IIRC, McD’s and various other chains even design venting and such to get the smell of the cooking food (chemically enhanced) in to the surrounding area. You know, so that more people can pay a fortune to get a food rush that doubles as a health disaster.
McDonald’s smells like a dirty deep fryer, it’s fucking disgusting.
I tend to feel the same, but those suckers certainly know their broad audience.
A very large culprit is your gut’s microbiome (the bacteria that live in our gut). The more junk food you eat, the more you will grow your craving for it.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202303/where-cravings-are-bred
Because sugar, fat and salt in those quantities are literally addictive. Our human/monkey brains were wired for survival, not overall health. Eating a large source of those three would’ve been a massive help in surviving winter when our next meal wouldn’t be guaranteed.
Want to experience the ultimate in shitty comfort food?
Come to the UK, go into town, have a few beers, get drunk and then stop for a massive dirty kebab on the way home.
Fucking bliss
I say the same about the pizza truck in DC after 2am
Because fat and sugar are drugs. People don’t usually think of them like drugs, because of the widely accepted, but very wrong, attitude that only illegal substances can be drugs. Sugar, fat, caffeine, alcohol or tobacco are all drugs. They all trigger a desirable chemical reaction in your brain, and all have addictive potential. At least 2 or 3 of them are also significantly more harmful to you than several types of actually illegal drugs.
And in general, though perhaps most strongly for drugs, many people suffer from the cognitive bias of “illegal=bad & legal=good. Automatically and by default”
I get the spirit of what you’re saying, they’re all habit forming, but fat and sugar (IE: carbohydrates) are macronutrients our bodies need to survive. Obviously they’re not needed in the quantities that are available to us in modern society, but our biological desire to seek out high calorie foods is a survival mechanism rather than what happens with other habit forming substances like tobacco.
I don’t mean to nitpick here but I feel like that distinction is important because saying “sugar and fat bad” without a little nuance can miss lead folks that aren’t properly educated on nutrition, which in my experience is a large portion of my fellow Americans.
Edit: just wanted to add here that there’s another comment by someone else who more or less states the same thing, but makes that distinction and I have no problem with it.
Because we didn’t evolve to live in lands of abundance. We evolved in scarce conditions and are attuned to that.
Food that delicious and high calorie would not be constantly available in the wild, so if we ever found anything close, it would be beneficial to eat as much as possible to store up calories and survive during periods of scarcity.
When I was a kid, I heard two unsubstantiated rumors about McDonald’s food:
- It used kangaroo meat (not sure why this was a claim)
- It mixed in nicotine (to make the food more addictive)
I doubt that either are true, but if the latter were maybe it would answer your question.
Pretty sure you’d have to label nicotine content and age restrict it no matter how it’s consumed.
They don’t mix in nicotine, no need for all of that when MSG exists. They do mix in MSG to the meats and cheeses. Pretty much all fast food does, because it makes it addictive, and tasty.
When I was a kid, I don’t think I knew what MSG was, so this reasoning would have been lost on me.
When I was a kid the racist “MSG in Chinese food” panic was happening. I knew about Chinese salt when I started cooking around 6 or 7
I don’t get it.
I’ve tried McDonalds food.
It’s more expensive than much better alternatives, it doesn’t look good, and it tastes worse, like the cheapest ultraprocessed crap you can find in the kind of budget supermarket that only carries foreign brands you’ve never heard of.
I can find better and cheaper food in seedy bars I’d never willingly go to, or by buying the cheapest brands (even the good brands or fast food joints, or buying natural ingredients, wouldn’t be significantly more expensive) and cooking at home.
It really boggles my mind. Is it like smoking? Do people start eating it due to peer pressure and never stop because they get addicted?
I don’t get it either. My wife loves the stuff but to me it’s in the uncanny valley of food. Unsettlingly almost, but not quite like food.
