Then and Now

Our ancestors back on the African savannah a couple of hundred thousand years back didn't have to worry about trans fats, because they are quite scarce in nature. They didn't have to worry about saturated fat, for that matter, because the animals they ate were very lean and running along beside a mama wildebeest and milking it is not very practical. They didn't have to worry about obesity or diabetes either.

On the other hand, they did have problems of their own. It's not that there wasn't enough to eat, at least most of the time. However, it was considerable effort. They had to run after the animals and walk after the plants, climb trees, dig up roots, crack nuts, and carry water or carry themselves and their food to the stream. Meanwhile they were dodging tigers and swatting mosquitoes. So they did have to make sure that the calories they took in exceeded the calories they put out to get them. (They needed a few extra for everything else they did, of course.)

So evolution equipped them with the appropriate preferences. Sugar tasted good, especially to kids who were trying to grow, because it gave them a lot of those scarce calories in a small package. And it came in fruits that were nothing like the bloated sugar bombs of today, produced by millenia of selective breeding. Instead, the fruits had a lot of fiber, so the sugar was absorbed slowly and didn't cause a spike in blood sugar. Fat tasted rich and satisfying for the same reason. Too much salt is bad, but we need a little of it, and it's scarce in natural foods, so salt tasted good as well.

Fast forward to today, in the US of A. Food is so cheap that it barely makes a notch in our budget. McDonald's wants to supersize us because the food costs them less than the packaging and the money they're paying the kid behind the counter. You're a big food tycoon and you want to sell us as much as you can. What do you do? You put in sugar, and salt -- in fact, two of the major categories of food that business analysts pay attention to are called sugary snacks and salty snacks. You want to get people to try it, so you start when they're young and impressionable, hiring cartoon characters to tell them to eat sugar frosted sugar puffs for breakfast, drink sugar water all day, and eat cowfatburgers with melted dairy fat and strips of fried pig fat for lunch. You put salt on fried starch and show 60 second movies of sexy people eating it at parties. All this stuff tastes good, because it pushes the buttons evolution built in to us when eating was hard work, so we eat a lot of it.

And you synthesize trans fats and put them in everything you can. They make crackers and fried starch (e.g., potato chips and fritos) crisp, cake products firm and rich tasting, and best of all, they don't go rancid, so your hohos can sit on the shelf at the 7-11 till you cash in your private social security account and still be good to sell. There's very little fiber in any of this stuff, so all that sugar goes right to our pancreases which squirt out insulin. It makes us feel good.

Instead of spending their days walking across the savannah in search of chips and cookies and burgers, the customers spend their days sitting in front of televisions and computers, or riding in cars. So we get fat. Then we get sick. And those food tycoons get rich.