Yummy
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.
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.
Therefore, the cure for fast food addiction is recreational drugs and alcohol!
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.
“Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smart arse!”
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.
Everything is a chemical
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.
They would have to die off before they reproduce
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.
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
The meat and cheeses are all loaded with MSG to make the food addictive, and tasty. Pretty much all fast food does this.
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.
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
Glutamate, it’s an analog for an important brain signaling amino acid. Many people get drowsy or get blurred vision from MSG, but industry has funded influencers and bots for years telling us that is a myth.
I don’t get it.
I’ve tried McDonalds food.
It’s more expensive than much better alternatives, it doesn’t look good, and it tastes worse, like the cheapest ultraprocessed crap you can find in the kind of budget supermarket that only carries foreign brands you’ve never heard of.
I can find better and cheaper food in seedy bars I’d never willingly go to, or by buying the cheapest brands (even the good brands or fast food joints, or buying natural ingredients, wouldn’t be significantly more expensive) and cooking at home.
It really boggles my mind. Is it like smoking? Do people start eating it due to peer pressure and never stop because they get addicted?
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”
Industrial chefs have turned food from art to science. The optimize every aspect to reach the “bliss point” on making food satisfy tastes while using cheapest ingredients possible.
In all that, there is no consideration of nutrition. Interestingly, the bliss point changes for people in different regions who have been exposed to a bliss point for a long time. An example is British candy which is too sweet to sell anywhere else. American food is considered overall disgusting to Europeans.
The science behind it is deep and rooted in the neuroscience of addiction. In the end, the worst possible diet anyone can have is any restaurant food, because it’s not designed to feed, it’s designed to sell.
