The same reason people will logically understand that crack is bad for them but crave it like crack
Grease, sugar, and a lot of chemicals.
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.
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.
As others have mentioned, dense carbohydrates and sugar are also attractive for the same reason.
Even more attractive is a combination of carbs and fat in the same food - which almost never occurs in nature.
They would have to die off before they reproduce
Yah this is important, there is no real such thing as “natural” selection anymore.
There is still selection happening but it’s wildly more complicated than nature alone and likely will take much, much longer to show effects, because we have reshaped the world to provide for us and can safely breed even with health conditions and bad habits.
It’s science, I don’t know the specifics of craving but I know they spent a lot of money to figure out how give you that feeling.
I’d guess sugar and fat, lots of both
I know about a funky thing where if you have equal amounts of sweet, salty, bitter, umami and sour you feel less full after eating it. It might be completely unrelated though.
You haven’t aged enough to where it feels like you have a rat trying to chew through your colon from the inside out when you eat it. That will cure you of the addiction right quick.
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
I’m not sure how much of it is microbiome related, but as someone who’s fallen into pretty bad junk food benders, I can absolutely concur that it’s self-fulfilling. I’ve spent hours awake staring at the ceiling in bed after eating what should be a fulfilling square 2,000 calories thinking about junk food.
The more you have the more you will crave it. There is a point where no part of you wants any junk food, but you have to abstain from it for a good while. You can crave the beans and the ground beef in your fridge, OP! You can absolutely find yourself craving a refreshing salad or a comforting baked potato. You learned to crave junk food, you can learn something else, even if it’s not as chemically engineered to make you want more of it. You can find yourself forcing down junk food in a simultaneous fit of disappointment and compulsion - if you’re forcing leafy greens down it’s at least not as existentially taxing.
I’ve also found success in surrounding myself with snacks or herbal teas that feel healthy. Yes a nut bar is full of sugar and calories, yes a fruity infusion won’t actually improve your health. Yes that extra goat cheese or can of sweet corn or tuna on the salad is making it heavier. But there’s nothing bad about finding more angles of attack to pull yourself away from the black hole that is fatty sugary oily super processed food.
I feel like junk food addiction is hard to talk about since you can get laughed at for it, it’s not crack, it’s a fucking hamburger. Nobody wants to hear about a grown ass man talk about how his willpower is surrendered to tendies. It’s fucking awful because food isn’t something you can quit cold turkey. So you have to go through a process of fending off cravings and that can be mentally annoying.
There’s also things around it that feel silly to discuss: being able to schedule and manage cooking and storing your own food, buying the right ingredients in the right amounts without finding a mold culture in your fridge twice a month, it can feel like you have to fight on many fronts. That’s where you really do need to figure out what works for you.
This guy gets it.
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.
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.
Because we didn’t evolve to live in lands of abundance. We evolved in scarce conditions and are attuned to that.
Food that delicious and high calorie would not be constantly available in the wild, so if we ever found anything close, it would be beneficial to eat as much as possible to store up calories and survive during periods of scarcity.
The meat and cheeses are all loaded with MSG to make the food addictive. Pretty much all fast food does this.
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?
Advertising and peer pressure as teens.
You could feed a family of 4 for a week on the cost. It has no nutritive value in addition to no flavor. It’s like some type of dystopian government food paste.
When I was a kid, I heard two unsubstantiated rumors about McDonald’s food:
- It used kangaroo meat (not sure why this was a claim)
- It mixed in nicotine (to make the food more addictive)
I doubt that either are true, but if the latter were maybe it would answer your question.
They don’t mix in nicotine, no need for all of that when MSG exists. They do mix in MSG to the meats and cheeses. Pretty much all fast food does, because it makes it addictive, and tasty.
When I was a kid, I don’t think I knew what MSG was, so this reasoning would have been lost on me.
When I was a kid the racist “MSG in Chinese food” panic was happening. I knew about Chinese salt when I started cooking around 6 or 7
I didn’t have Chinese food until my wife, then girlfriend, introduced it to me in my twenties. A Chinese restaurant was opened in my small hometown when I was in my teens, but we never partook. I’m not sure why.
I didn’t cook until, again, my teens, but at that point I literally had to ask how to boil water for hot dogs. My family was fairly progressive, so “Chinese salt” never came up, but MSG was definitely beyond me.
Having a reaction to a food additive is not racist. You are parroting the bots spread forth by a $7B industry. MSG reaction is real. Do we call people who get food allergies racist?
Yet, everyone I know that had so called reactions to MSG in Chinese food could eat Pizza Hut and McDonald’s which both use MSG and they never had a ‘reaction.’
They also haven’t complained about MSG since the late '80s. There may be some people that have an actual allergy to MSG, but I have yet to meet one, and I have a much higher sampling of people to pull from than most.
Pretty sure you’d have to label nicotine content and age restrict it no matter how it’s consumed.
Agreed, but I don’t think the urban legend was claiming that they were doing this legitimately.
