But I hate what it does to my mind, body and soul.
Waking up with a mild hangover on a Sunday morning after a night out prompted me to seek out takeaway food. My junk of choice on that particular day was KFC, a 3 piece feed with an upsized serving of chips (extra chicken salt!), to be exact. To my disappointment, KFC wasn’t open until 10am, it was 9am at the time, so I settled for a Subway meatball foot long dashed generously with salt and pepper, and chilli sauce. After polishing off the foot long which was very disappointing because I had my heart set on KFC, I started contemplating about food. Why on earth would I crave for KFC when I haven’t had it for 15 years? Considering that I’ve distanced myself from junk food for so long, I thought to myself it cannot be addiction because addiction is habit forming, and I’m 15 years removed from the junk food habit.
And then it hit me, we as human beings are neurologically wired to consume “junk” food in abundance because of our ancestry. We seek out food that we most require when we’re in a vulnerable state. For example, when I was hung over, my body was dehydrated, so I was seeking out salty foods in order for my body to better retain fluids. When our body is in a vulnerable state, our decision making is hampered. When we are hungry, we are in a vulnerable state. Our mind’s immediate response is to replenish our body with glucose (sugar), our body’s fuel. In the past, we have to gather and hunt for our food. We have to share our food among every member of the family or tribe. We were forced to stop eating when we finished our ration because food was scarce at times so we had to naturally regulate our consumption better. There were long periods when food is not available so periods of starvation were quite normal. The opposite is also true when we gorge ourselves with food because there were plenty of it, although this is a rarity.
These days, food is so accessible everywhere through vending machines, chocolate fundraisers, canteens and supermarkets. Because of our neurology, we succumb to our natural predisposition to select sweet food first, salty second and fatty last. Of course there’s also the magic combination of the 3 that makes food completely irresistible. We form bad habits that exacerbates our problem and makes it even harder to resist food. Unfortunately, in today’s society within developed or developing countries, there is no food shortage to save us.
