BurnOutBrighter6 t1_j9wybae wrote on February 25, 2023 at 3:48 AM

Because for like 99.9999% of evolutionary history, calories were scarce and unpredictable. You were WAY more likely to die of starvation (due to sickness, drought, winter, injury) than somehow finding so many calories that you got fat. So we all evolved the strategy: "when you do find a high-cal food source, eat as much as possible!!" And in those calorie-scarce times, (aka essentially all of human history!) that was a great strategy to have. It kept your ancestors alive.

Calories becoming cheap and abundant for everyday normal people happened in the last ~200 years, which is a split second on the evolution timescale. There just hasn't been anywhere near enough time to adapt to this yet. So we're all still running the "eat as many calories as you can find" program in our brains because that worked great for like a million years and has only needed the "but not too much" asterisk for a tiny amount of time since then.

Taira_Mai t1_j9x7nmi wrote on February 25, 2023 at 5:15 AM

>Because for like 99.9999% of evolutionary history, calories were scarce and unpredictable. You were WAY more likely to die of starvation (due to sickness, drought, winter, injury) than somehow finding so many calories that you got fat. So we all evolved the strategy: "when you do find a high-cal food source, eat as much as possible!!" And in those calorie-scarce times, (aka essentially all of human history!) that was a great strategy to have. It kept your ancestors alive.

Also we have the "turn those excess calories into fat, you might need it later!" strategy - hence we get fat.

Because for 100s of thousands of years our ancestors died of all kinds of other causes before they could get fat in addition to having a calorie deficient diet.

avalon1805 t1_j9yc9dk wrote on February 25, 2023 at 1:40 PM

So, you telling that when I eat three burguers in a row im just following mother nature? Interesting

DoctorMobius21 t1_j9ymfve wrote on February 25, 2023 at 3:04 PM

To be fair, even in the modern world, there are still many situations where a person may loose access to needed calories. For example, you go out for a bike ride, get hit by a car and end up in hospital. It may be days or in rarer cases weeks before you even eat a substantial meal again. Yes you may be given nutrients and fluids artificially, but not to the degree that we get from eating. Weight loss in hospital stay is incredibly common. There are other scenarios too where someone may need fat to survive.