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When the taste buds turn foes
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Don't let taste guide your choice of food
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Never overeat tasty food
Our taste buds served us well. We like sweet foods and sweet taste had helped our ancestors identify energy- rich fruit full of easily digestible simple sugars.
A taste for salt helped them identify the mineral essential for human life. An inbuilt wariness for bitter foods protected them from poisonous plants. Sour warns us that the food is spoilt.
But the taste buds are not our friends anymore. Once upon a time they made us eat the right foods and avoid the wrong ones. We now live in a society where the tastiest stuff is quite likely to prove harmful in the long run. And our taste-driven habit of going back for more has hardwired us into becoming addicted to the wrong foods.
Take sweet, for example. Humans are now capable of conjuring up foods that are hundred times sweeter than anything found in nature. Processed sugar is occupying an ever-increasing proportion of our daily calorie intake.
An energy-rich snack might have helped an ancestor run faster towards prey or away from danger.
Today, it is more likely to end up adding another layer to the cushions of fat beneath our skins. Sweeteners added regularly to processed foods stun the brain into something that resembles addiction. And once you develop a taste for hyper-sweet stuff, you are unlikely to eat the blander but healthy fruit that nature offers.
Salt was once a precious commodity and was even a form of salary for Roman soldiers. Now, we get thousand tons of salt from the ocean every day, and it comes dirt cheap. Scarcity once imposed a natural limit on salt intake, but now the limit is imposed by satiety.
Overeating tasty foods was a good thing thousands of years ago. Now it is suicide on the slow. It's no longer healthy to let taste guide what we eat. And it is no longer healthy to let satiety guide how much we eat.
RAJIV. M
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