You know in your the food that ma smile, even if your demurs. Don't be hangry
Junk food, right in that glorious moment of imbibing, delivers both pleasure and comfort. Biologically, we’re programmed to seek it. Human jaws and stomachs are small. We cannot, like the storied pythons of YouTube, ingest entire alligators and subsist without further nourishment for months on end. To our bodies, evolved to survive as hunter-gatherers over millions of years, the next famine is always coming. Consequently, your system is calibrated to propel you toward the maximum amount of calories fitted into the most easily digestible package.
Back on the African savannah, that meant meat, and increasingly more of it. In 2017, it translates as sugar, fat and salt – the dietary dark triad – which remorselessly strobe your brain’s reward centres. In particular, the much pilloried white powder is catnip for your pleasure hormones: as well as triggering a big squirt of dopamine, it chivvies along the amino acid tryptophan, which facilitates production of the body’s ‘happy hormone’ serotonin.
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