In the previous post, I explained the two primary reasons for eating: hunger and desire.
The goal of hunger is to replace the calories that we have used up in our daily activities- walking, talking, working, and to keep the body’s systems going- the heart has to beat, the lungs have to breathe, the brain has to think…
Hunger forces us to find food and eat it, tasty or not. Once hunger is satisfied, there is no urge to seek more food. Going back to our hunter-gatherer days, finding food involved both risk and exertion, so once hunger was satisfied it made sense to return to the safety of the cave.
Eating only to satisfy hunger will not make a person fat. To put it another way, eating only for hunger is like living from paycheck to paycheck- there is never any extra money to put in the bank. This strategy is fine as long as the paychecks keep coming. But if the money stops there will be trouble.
For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, living from paycheck to paycheck was not a good survival strategy. They had no farms and no cattle. They ate whatever nature gave them, which meant that the food supply went up and down with the seasons. To survive the lean months, one had to put on some fat when food was plentiful, to eat beyond hunger, to “pig out.”
What kinds of foods make us pig out? Tasty foods, of course, especially tasty carbs- sweet foods, starchy foods. For our ancestors, this meant fruits and roots. So we were, and are, programmed to find sweet and starch foods tasty, because over-eating these foods in the good times helped us put on some fat for times when food was hard to find.
Note #1: Many of us are also over-eat salty foods; we crave salt because we need a pinch of salt daily to maintain life. There was little salt in the jungle except what was naturally present in food especially meat. So we craved salt, and made sure to eat what little we found. Craving, as we shall see in the next post, is a step above desire, and craving can easily rise to addiction. Now that salt (extracted from the sea or from salt mines) is available in unlimited amounts, most humans are salt addicted!
Note #2: What about fat? There is not much fat in the jungle. Wild animals are lean- to make venison sausage, the butcher has to add up to 50% pork fat. The only other source of fat in the jungle is nuts and seeds, but one cannot extract oil form nuts and seeds without growing them in bulk and using machines. When we learned to keep cows and make butter and to extract oils from nuts and seeds, we realized that anything cooked in fat tastes so much better! We use fat to enhance the the flavor and texture of other foods, but we do not eat fat by itself. When was the last time you drank a bottle of oil or munched on pure lard?
To summarize:
Eating for hunger: I will eat whatever I find. If what I find is edible but not particularly tasty, I will stop eating when I am full.
Eating for desire: If I find tasty food, I will eat whether I am hungry or not and will continue eating even when full.
In the next post, I will show how today’s foods can elevate desire into addiction…
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