alt Hacker NewsOur genes are heavily evolved to live in calorie scarce environments. In those environments, high calorie foods are amazing. Our biology is built to find them incredibly rewarding.
Science and capitalism have created incredibly delicious foods that are nutritionally lacking, hyper optimized for (against?) our now mis-aligned reward system. In the west, calories are not scarce and the most delcious foods are far from the most nutritious. It will take a long time for our genes to catchup.
Mass producing delicious, cheap, but low nutrition food is profitable. Companies have gotten very good at it. That's the real big change.
that's the macro change, yeah, but the rate of increase in obesity in the us got sharper after the 80s, so it doesn't feel like the complete picture to me.
we got the abundant food and the largely car bound live cycles and it still kept getting worse for decades after that point. I suppose it could be generations growing up only knowing this and so habituated to it more?