In most of the world, it used to be that people mostly drank water, and today they’re consuming more and more sweetened beverages. Fruit juice didn’t even come into being until the late 1950s, except for what you squeezed at home, and milk—there was some, but people didn’t drink so much of it. The average American has not changed the amount of water he consumes in the last 30 years or so. But he’s added 22 ounces of caloric beverages to his diet, and that’s 300 extra calories per day. Then you match that kind of diet with human biology. We naturally prefer sweet and fatty foods because of what those foods used to mean for survival when we were hunter-gatherers. They had the nutrients we needed, and they let us store more energy for the hungry season. [via Newsweek]
So now here we are living in a world where everywhere you look is a calorie. You literally can’t turn around 360 degrees right now without seeing some sort of food, I guarantee it. And since there is no longer scarcity, our bodies have become accustomed to consuming more. We have to train and exercise and consciously think about what we are ingesting, because otherwise our brains will tell our mouths to keep eating, and our stomachs will keep growing, along with our asses.It’s a vicious evolutionary puzzle, but one that we have luckily solved. Unfortunately the solution isn’t an easy one. It’s hard to shut off that instinct that says “Yeah, I DEFINITELY need one more of those cookies”, because that instinct is what brought our species to this point of world domination. But if we don’t learn to control it, we suffer the medical consequences, not to mention the unsightly large-butt syndrome.
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