The same reason people will logically understand that crack is bad for them but crave it like crack
This is actually shockingly remarkably true.
There is very little to differentiate your addiction to junk food and your addiction to sex or your addiction to crack rock.
No no, they’re much different. It’s totally legal to be addicted to McDonald’s and sex.
McDonald’s fries have crack in them.
There is a chemical in your brain called dopamine which is an important part of how we feel pleasure. Use of recreational drugs and alcohol causes a rush of this chemical and that is part of the pleasure we feel from using them. The problem is that regular use of such chemicals causes us to have lower levels of dopamine when we are not using them. We end up feeling a desire for the drug or booze to get our dopamine levels back up.
Diets high in sugar, salt, and carbs also causes a dopamine rush. When you eat that food regularly, it lowers your normal dopamine levels, just like drugs and alcohol do, if not to the same level. That is why you feel that craving. Eating such food occasionally is fine, but if you do it to often, you can literally get an addiction to it.
Edit to add -
You mentioned that fast foods are low quality and bad for you. That is true, but but only in high quantities. Fats and sugars were high value foods to our ancient ancestors. Fats are very high source of energy. You get more than twice the energy from a gram of fat than you get from a gram of carbohydrates or protein. Sugars are easily digested making them a source of quick energy compared to other carbs, fats, or proteins. Eating these kinds of foods gave us a survival advantage over those who didn’t, at least until we learned the agricultural skills to make them easy to acquire. Now, many or most people can get such foods any time they want and though they no longer give us an advantage, and eating a lot of them is actually harmful in the long run, those ancient taste preferences still remain in our evolved programing.
We evolved for a life of scarcity, but now we live in a world of plenty.
based middle of the road, analytical, truthful and realistic take.
Therefore, the cure for fast food addiction is recreational drugs and alcohol!
RFK, is that you?
Overactivate dopamine receptors and the receptors shut down, like all receptors. Lack of dopamine signalling is Parkinson’s disease.
Came here to post this and found it already +1 to this being one of the main reason it’s causing cravings.
If you want further reading look up information on the pleasure - reward circuitry in the brain.
You crave salt and fat because your body needs a little bit of these things to survive, but finding salt and fat out in nature is really really hard, so those cavemen that liked the taste of salty or fatty foods enough to make the extra effort to find those foods were more likely to survive to be your ancestors and you inherited that behaviour. That’s why you like McDonald’s, it’s full of the salt and fat that is hard to obtain if your diet consists of mostly roots and mushrooms and leaves.
McDonalds is bad for you because it’s unnaturally full of salt and fat. Far, far more than your body needs and far more than your cavemen ancestors would have eaten naturally. Especially if you eat McDonald’s often. Too much of anything turns that thing into a poison.
McDonald’s has only been around a generation or two. That’s not enough time for the people who crave McDonalds and eat too much of it to die off, leaving mostly people who don’t crave McDonalds to remain.
Don’t forget the big one, carbs. Carbohydrates are fairly hard to find in nature, even if you have a carnivorous diet and you get plenty of fat and proteins, you will desperately crave carbohydrates which are easier for the body to convert to energy than just fat by itself, and most animals were pretty lean so you would be very lucky to even get a lot of fat in your diet to begin with. If you just eat lean meat you will die.
Fruit, starchy tubers, honey and other natural sugars were prized sources of energy, this is why we love sweets so much and why a package of oily french fries feels like heaven, you are responding to natural imperatives that still think you’re at risk of starving.
They would have to die off before they reproduce
Yah this is important, there is no real such thing as “natural” selection anymore.
There is still selection happening but it’s wildly more complicated than nature alone and likely will take much, much longer to show effects, because we have reshaped the world to provide for us and can safely breed even with health conditions and bad habits.
Or if they produced Infertile Offspring.
As others have mentioned, dense carbohydrates and sugar are also attractive for the same reason.
Even more attractive is a combination of carbs and fat in the same food - which almost never occurs in nature.
Grease, sugar, and a lot of chemicals.
Don’t forget loads of salt!
Like-- every step of the way, fast food places have an opportunity to aim for ‘healthier’ or ‘more delicious’ choices, overwhelmingly with profit-making in mind. That’s the main thing to keep in mind.
IIRC, McD’s and various other chains even design venting and such to get the smell of the cooking food (chemically enhanced) in to the surrounding area. You know, so that more people can pay a fortune to get a food rush that doubles as a health disaster.
McDonald’s smells like a dirty deep fryer, it’s fucking disgusting.
I tend to feel the same, but those suckers certainly know their broad audience.
Everything is a chemical
Because your diet sucks. A few months of eating only unprocessed food and you’d probably eat McDonald’s exactly one more time in your life
And I do specifically mean McDonald’s… It’s uniquely disgusting, even among fast food. It tastes like it’s reconstituted food scraps doped with sugar
As someone who is trying to climb out of this hole, I can back up your sentiment.
Being acclimated to shitty food, and thinking flavor is just sharp strong sensations in your mouth is one thing that perpetuates over consuming fast food. Your brain gets trained to crave the dopamine rush that the sensations of fast food briefly cause.
It’s amazing how you can eat 12 chicken nuggets with large fries and still feel like you haven’t eaten anything.
Oh, I’d feel nauseous lol, those nuggets are so gross and I don’t really like the fries
“Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smart arse!”
Is that Mike Myers? I still haven’t seen so I married an ax murderer even though I own it
Yes it is. lol
Why deprive yourself so? It’s easily my favorite Myers film.
I know and I’m a huge fan of Mike Myers but once I watch it I can’t un Watch it so it’s like I’m saving it for a bad day when I need to be cheered up. But you’re right tomorrow is not promised, I should make hay while the sun is out
It’s science, I don’t know the specifics of craving but I know they spent a lot of money to figure out how give you that feeling.
I’d guess sugar and fat, lots of both
I know about a funky thing where if you have equal amounts of sweet, salty, bitter, umami and sour you feel less full after eating it. It might be completely unrelated though.
Because sugar, fat and salt in those quantities are literally addictive. Our human/monkey brains were wired for survival, not overall health. Eating a large source of those three would’ve been a massive help in surviving winter when our next meal wouldn’t be guaranteed.
To expand, in an fMRI, eating sugar lights up the same brain regions as cocaine.
A very large culprit is your gut’s microbiome (the bacteria that live in our gut). The more junk food you eat, the more you will grow your craving for it.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202303/where-cravings-are-bred
I’m not sure how much of it is microbiome related, but as someone who’s fallen into pretty bad junk food benders, I can absolutely concur that it’s self-fulfilling. I’ve spent hours awake staring at the ceiling in bed after eating what should be a fulfilling square 2,000 calories thinking about junk food.
The more you have the more you will crave it. There is a point where no part of you wants any junk food, but you have to abstain from it for a good while. You can crave the beans and the ground beef in your fridge, OP! You can absolutely find yourself craving a refreshing salad or a comforting baked potato. You learned to crave junk food, you can learn something else, even if it’s not as chemically engineered to make you want more of it. You can find yourself forcing down junk food in a simultaneous fit of disappointment and compulsion - if you’re forcing leafy greens down it’s at least not as existentially taxing.
I’ve also found success in surrounding myself with snacks or herbal teas that feel healthy. Yes a nut bar is full of sugar and calories, yes a fruity infusion won’t actually improve your health. Yes that extra goat cheese or can of sweet corn or tuna on the salad is making it heavier. But there’s nothing bad about finding more angles of attack to pull yourself away from the black hole that is fatty sugary oily super processed food.
I feel like junk food addiction is hard to talk about since you can get laughed at for it, it’s not crack, it’s a fucking hamburger. Nobody wants to hear about a grown ass man talk about how his willpower is surrendered to tendies. It’s fucking awful because food isn’t something you can quit cold turkey. So you have to go through a process of fending off cravings and that can be mentally annoying.
There’s also things around it that feel silly to discuss: being able to schedule and manage cooking and storing your own food, buying the right ingredients in the right amounts without finding a mold culture in your fridge twice a month, it can feel like you have to fight on many fronts. That’s where you really do need to figure out what works for you.
fast food isn’t bad for you, unless you eat only fast food for years. if you wanna recreate the MCD taste at home, try sprinkling MSG on your food.
Do I look like I know what an MSG is?
You can buy it in a bottle like spices. It looks like salt. I like to replace the regular amount of salt with 50% msg and 50% salt when cooking
Just go to the grocery store and buy some?
MSG king of flawor (or so I hear)
Monosodium glutamat
Now I want a doormat with “monosodium gluta” inscribed on it
Unfortunately they did leave the e off the end, so unless you’re Australian…
Makes Shit Good powder.
They has test kitchens and spend a ton of money on R&D to create that craving plus all the cartoon characters and kids toy’s and sponsoring school events gets kids hooked young.
You haven’t aged enough to where it feels like you have a rat trying to chew through your colon from the inside out when you eat it. That will cure you of the addiction right quick.
Want to experience the ultimate in shitty comfort food?
Come to the UK, go into town, have a few beers, get drunk and then stop for a massive dirty kebab on the way home.
Fucking bliss
I saw on a fb reel a place that was serving bread with chips now? Like bread and fried potatoes? With salt. With ketchup.
Are you just describing a chip butty?
Because fat and sugar are drugs. People don’t usually think of them like drugs, because of the widely accepted, but very wrong, attitude that only illegal substances can be drugs. Sugar, fat, caffeine, alcohol or tobacco are all drugs. They all trigger a desirable chemical reaction in your brain, and all have addictive potential. At least 2 or 3 of them are also significantly more harmful to you than several types of actually illegal drugs.
And in general, though perhaps most strongly for drugs, many people suffer from the cognitive bias of “illegal=bad & legal=good. Automatically and by default”
I get the spirit of what you’re saying, they’re all habit forming, but fat and sugar (IE: carbohydrates) are macronutrients our bodies need to survive. Obviously they’re not needed in the quantities that are available to us in modern society, but our biological desire to seek out high calorie foods is a survival mechanism rather than what happens with other habit forming substances like tobacco.
I don’t mean to nitpick here but I feel like that distinction is important because saying “sugar and fat bad” without a little nuance can miss lead folks that aren’t properly educated on nutrition, which in my experience is a large portion of my fellow Americans.
Edit: just wanted to add here that there’s another comment by someone else who more or less states the same thing, but makes that distinction and I have no problem with it.
