When Evolution Is Outpaced ...

Why do we eat too much and even continue to eat when we are full and consciously know we are undermining our health and shortening our lives? Why does our eating mechanism seem to be malfunctioning and going against our best interests?

The answer is, human beings have an evolved mechanism to eat whenever food is available.

Human nature evolved mostly on the plains of Africa, where our ancestors wandered around as nomadic scavengers, gatherers, and hunters, long before we settled in communities. Our days were spent looking hard for food. When we found some, it made a lot of sense to eat as much as we could because we had no way to store or carry extra food, and we didn't know how long it might be until we would eat again.

These days we have much more food than we need. We can eat as much as we want, 24 hours a day.

To make matters worse, we seem to have a particular penchant for sweet and fatty foods. Maybe these are fairly common on the plains when we evolved, so we did not need to be a glutton for vegetables. However, sweet fruits and fatty animal flesh were hard to get. When our prehistorical ancestors found sweet fruits and killed an animal, it was advantageous to eat as much as possible. So unless we work very hard to control ourselves, we feel fine and happy to finish that juicy hamburger and head off for dessert.

Our food industry has made so much progress while we still have the same stone-age brain that we inherit from our gatherer-hunter ancestors, with a hard-wired mechanism telling us to eat as much as possible. We are so out-dated, out-paced, out-numbered and out-smart'ed that it is for sure a tough battle to fight, but we have to try no matter what.

If we don't know how our food brain works, if we don't know what we are dealing with, there is no chance we can prevail.

To read more, go to Your Stone Age Brain.

Yes, I know. You want the recipes for good food. They are on the way...

Did you check out my salt page yet?

Enjoy.