Highly Palatable Foods: The First Big Reason Why You Are Fatter Than a Hunter Gatherer (Nutrition For Health and Hypertrophy Part 19)

In the previous part of this series, we talked about food preferences and what factors in our food make our brains release dopamine to get us to learn to eat them when the same stimulus arises again in our lives.

To refresh your memory:

Innate preferences:

• Caloric density (we have a very strong preference for high calorie foods)
• Fat
• Carbohydrates
• Protein
• Sweet flavor
• Salty flavor
• Meaty flavor (umami)

Innate aversions:

• Bitter flavor
• Odor of decay
• Anything that causes digestive distress (although this is a conditioned taste aversion and not a true innate preference)

Basically any time you eat a food that matches the innate human preferences, your brain releases dopamine (the neurotransmitter that makes your body learn things and is covered in more detail in part 18).

Let’s say you eat cookies for the first time.

You get a strong sweet taste and your stomach recognizes the high caloric density coming from the carbohydrates (flour) and the fats (butter/oils) in the cookies. These two factors mean that your brain will release a large amount of dopamine after you eat cookies.

This will make your brain “learn” that the smell and sight of cookies means that it should stimulate your appetite because that will mean you will eat them and the same good feelings will repeat.

As you do this over and over in your life, this “learning” from the repeated hits of dopamine from the same stimulus keeps getting stronger to the point that most adults today feel hungry by the mere distant smell of cookies.

You Evolved to Live a Different Life

All of these preferences arose because they help keep you alive in the hunter gatherer environment. Remember they weren’t buying food from the supermarket and they didn’t have supplements to manage deficiencies.

• Preferring high calorie foods means you are more likely to survive and breed as you have more energy
• Preference for umami taste (the taste associated with the amino acid glutamate) presumably means you are more likely to get more protein rich foods like meat which means a higher likelihood of survival for not just yourself but also for your fetus (if female) [I use the term “presumably” because there are many foods that aren’t rich in protein but still have the taste of glutamate – like tomatoes]
• Preference for sweet taste meant they were able to recognize and eat calorie rich ripe fruits
• Preference for salty foods likely developed because we expel a lot of salt when we sweat so we need to get in extra salt from our diet (most other animals like rats don’t have a preference for salty foods)
• Etc. (Primates including us even evolved the ability to see the color red because it helps us forage for higher nutrition foods like reddish/orange ripe fruits and red leaves)

Basically, your body and your taste buds evolved to keep you alive and enable you to reproduce in a world where energy and nutrition were scarce.

(Other than salt almost all of our preferences come down to getting more calories. Note that we don’t have as much food preference/reward for things like vitamins and minerals other than salt because presumably they are easy to get from the environment in sufficient quantities.)

You couldn’t buy food from a shop and read the nutrition off the label to make sure you were getting enough of everything. Your body had to evolve such that that you were naturally seeking everything you needed in the right quantities.

And this system worked really well. As covered already in great detail in part 17, hunter gatherers live off their environment and have almost no lifestyle diseases like high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, etc.

In part 17, we concluded that it’s not the sugar, not the fat, not the carbs, not plants, and not meat that’s causing our lifestyle problems. But we didn’t answer what is causing them.

If it’s not carbs, not sugar, not fats, not red meat, not plants, not animals, why are we dying from diabetes, hypertension, and heart attacks and hunter gatherer’s aren’t? What are we doing wrong?

This piece has the first part of the answer.

Palatability

Roughly how much a particular food is preferred is called palatability. It is how much pleasure and learning (endorphins and dopamine) you derive from eating that food.

Foods that taste good and have a lot of calories are more palatable while foods that are bitter and not as calorie dense are low in palatability (and everything in between).

Under normal circumstances where we hunt and gather our food from the environment, everything works well.

You eat things like fruits, raw and cooked meat, starchy tubers, honey, etc. and you get some pleasure and dopamine induced learning from eating them and life is good.

But what happens when you encounter food and environments that you never evolved to deal with?

Highly Palatable Foods (Supernormal Stimulus)

The first big reason why we have all these lifestyle diseases that hunter gatherers don’t is that we have access to highly palatable foods.

Things like:

• Pizza
• Cake
• Cookies
• Sugary drinks
• Etc.

Basically:

• Foods with added fats
• Foods with added sugars
• Foods with lots of added salts
• Foods with lots of flavorings including spices
• Foods with low fiber (refined flours/polished grains/etc.)

These foods release so much dopamine and endorphins in our brains that we quickly become somewhat addicted to them. Even the faintest cues are enough to stimulate our appetite for these foods (it works both ways – when you get hungry, you are likely to seek these highly rewarding foods again).

Even though all the ingredients they are made with are natural, when concentrated and put together in one food, they release a ton of dopamine in our brains and make us learn to crave them. They are addictive substances.

This is called a supernormal stimulus (a stimulus that is much stronger than what your brain evolved to deal with in the natural world).

Fun fact: Most addictive substances are natural substances in highly concentrated forms.

The leaves of the coca plant have been chewed by people as a mild stimulant for a long time. When you extract and concentrate the active ingredients in the coca leaf, you get a highly addictive substance called cocaine.

When processed even further, it turns into the even stronger crack cocaine.

This is one large part of the reason why people in industrialized society have all these health problems. They are surrounded by highly palatable addictive foods which drive them to overeat and carry excess body fat. This leads them to develop heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension over time.

Hunter Gatherer Food vs Your Food

Hunter gatherer food is very boring and not very high in palatability. They eat things like:

• Wild fruits and nuts (which are not like the fruits and nuts you have access to. Wild fruits have less starch/sugar in them and more seeds because their main purpose is to help the plant breed, not to help you meet your nutritional needs.)
• Meat eaten raw or cooked over a fire (sometimes the meat is eaten a bit stale; organ meats are usually prized)
• Wild grains (which they’ve been baking into bread long before agriculture was a thing)
• Honey (which they drink by the glass)
• Other natural foods based on seasonal availability

What is important to note is that the foods and flavors they have access to are limited and that they do not have the ability to concentrate and combine their properties nearly to the same extent that we do.

Hunter gather meals are usually:

• Simple meals (e.g. meat, or honey, or starchy tubers) and not 100 different ingredients put together like a hamburger (this makes a big difference in how satiating a food is, as I will cover later in this series)
• Bland and boring. They are not adding tons of sugars and spices to their foods to make them tastier.
• Repetitive. They are eating the same foods every day. Variety comes by seasons so they might eat the same things for months at a time (food variety leads to overeating, this will be covered later in this series)
• Devoid of added fats and sweeteners: Only very rarely do hunter gatherers have extra fats and sweeteners to add to their foods to increase their palatability.
• Raw or cooked with basic methods. Their ability to cook is restricted to simpler methods like roasting and heating over a fire.

Basically they eat whatever they can eat in a less palatable and less rewarding form.

On the other hand, how do we eat in the modern industrialized world? We eat:

• Fruits and nuts that have been modified to have maximum starch/sugar and minimal seeds
• Meals with many ingredients and differing flavors
• Foods with added calories in the form of added sugars or fats
• Foods with added flavors in the form of added sugars, spices, and salts
• Different foods with every meal (we view our food as a form of entertainment)
• Foods that have been cooked in a way to significantly enhance their palatability (unlike hunter gatherers who can just heat things over a fire, we can boil, steam, fry, saute and grill in added fats, smoke, slow roast, and do other things to our food that they can’t).

We are eating foods in their highly concentrated highly rewarding and highly palatable forms. This drives us to overeat them with every meal.

Overeating makes us fat. Carrying excess body fat leads us to develop heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and other lifestyle diseases.

Note that there are factors other than obesity (like a lack of exercise, high chronic stress, and a messed up circadian rhythm/poor sleep) that contribute to these diseases.

I will touch upon them later in this series but they are not the focus of this series (which has already exploded beyond what I originally imagined).

When I published part 1, I thought it’d be done in 5 articles, and here we are at part 19 and I am less than halfway through. If god wills it, I will do an entire in-depth series like this one on topics like stress, exercise, and sleep.

Enter The Food Industry

As covered previously in this series, it’s been about 2.5 million years since the emergence of our genus Homo.

We were hunter gatherers for more than ~99.6% of it. We were subsistence farmers for ~0.39% of it.

And we’ve been in the industrialized world for less than 0.01% of our history.

When you look at the fact that much of our brain is ancient and has structures that evolved far before even the emergence of our genus, you will realize that we are not evolved to live in this industrialized world.

In the industrial world, we not only have highly palatable foods, but these foods are engineered to be:

• Even more palatable
• Even more calorie dense
• Cheaper and easier to obtain
• And to top it off, you are bombarded with cues to want them again and again by using advertising and promotions

The food industry (includes all commercial foods like packaged factory foods, restaurants, street foods, etc.) has a strong incentive to maximize profits.

How can a food manufacturer/seller maximize his profits? By getting people to buy their products over and over again.

How can they make sure you buy their product over and over again? By making their foods highly palatable and as addictive as legally possible.

The fact that you get overweight and addicted and die of heart attacks or diabetes is an afterthought.

Manufacturers and food sellers make their food extremely calorie dense by adding cheap fats like oils to their products.

They make them extremely tasty by adding the right combinations of salt, sugars, and fats to them.

They make it even more tasty by adding meaty (umami) taste to the food by adding MSG, or soy sauce, cheese, or fish sauce to it.

They remove fiber from their products so they don’t fill up the stomach as much and digest faster and thus allow you to eat more.

Basically the food industry is firing on all fronts – they make their food highly calorie dense, extra sweet, extra meaty, and extra salty. Usually many of these and sometimes all of these.

It is very rare to find foods in nature that are both high in fats and carbohydrates at the same time. But very easy to find such foods in our meals – noodles, bread with added fats, ice cream, pizza, etc. (often these foods also contain added umami flavor as well).

As a result, the food when consumed releases TONS of dopamine in your brain and you learn to crave these foods. You become addicted to them in a way.

Your brain did not evolve to be able to handle eating foods like this. Foods that are this palatable do not exist in nature.

The meaty taste of umami that comes from the glutamate in meat in small amounts is nowhere near as strong as crystalline MSG or soy sauce or fish sauce (very high in glutamate as a result of the decomposition of fish proteins). You simply did not evolve to eat these items.

When you see “added natural flavors” and “added artificial flavors” on food labels these are the types of things they practically mean. It means “enhanced palatability to increase the consumption of their foods”.

Once the food industry gets you hooked on their highly palatable offerings, it makes sure that you keep getting hit with the right cues so that you are driven to come back to them and make more purchases.

This is why Coke and Pepsi and Pizza Hut and McDonald’s spend so much money on advertising. To keep reminding you of them. To remind you of the palatability of their products.

To trigger your reward system to get you to buy their products again.

This is not their “fault”.

This is simply a result of the capitalistic desire to earn higher profits. The prices go down and the calories and taste (the biggest factors of palatability) go up.

Practical Recommendation

If you want to lose fat and manage your weight, you must minimize your exposure to highly palatable foods like:

• Foods that have both very high carbohydrates and very high fats (carbs like grains or sugars with fats like milk and cheese e.g. things like pizza and ice cream and cake and donuts and chips and chocolate)
• Alcohol (calorie dense and inherently addictive)
• Sugary drinks (they digest quickly and have little fiber and satiety)
• Foods with lots of added fats (e.g. dishes with tons of oil, butter, or cream added to them)
• Foods with added flavors whether natural or artificial (e.g. pick unflavored yoghurt over flavored yoghurt, avoid foods that contain added umami taste like things with MSG and fish sauce e.g. instant noodles)

Choose to eat simpler foods where possible (basically the antithesis of the above list).

The reason why many diets like low carb and low fat work is not because they are low carb or low fat, but because they cut out many of these highly palatable foods from your diet (and thus help you create a caloric deficit).

The problem is not fats or carbs or meat or plants. The problem is combining and eating them in a way that substantially magnifies their food rewards and drives overeating.

This is 10x more important for you if you are one of those people who have the genetics that very strongly prioritize food rewards (some people are far more susceptible than others and this is the reason why some people remain quite thin without trying while others blow up).

Personally I am in the club that loves highly palatable foods and can’t stop eating them unless they run out. If I have chocolate in my fridge, I am constantly thinking about it until I eat it (this is why I don’t stock junk food in my fridge – because I know I’ll eat it all).

Incidentally this is the second big reason why everyone in the industrialized world is getting fat and unhealthy while hunter gatherers do not. Our food is far cheaper and more convenient to acquire.

But I will cover that in the next part of this series.

See you then.

– Harsh Strongman