MIKA BRZEZINSKI'S OBSESSION WITH FAST FOOD

Mika Brzezinski, co-host on Morning Joe, is marketing a new book. The title, Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--and My Own. It isn’t unusual that they are selling books on this program so that is not the point of the blog post; however, the subject of the book is.  The author strongly implies that obesity is the result of people becoming addicted to sugar, salt, and fat. She is quick to move some of the responsibility from the individual and proportion out a large fraction of the blame to the food industry.  As a person interested in evolutionary psychology, I see obesity from a different lens.

 

We evolved through a long torturous process of trial and error biologists refer to as adaptation through natural selection. Our branch, humans, budded off the tree of life some 5 million year ago. Evolution may be the greatest story ever told but also a long complicated and continuous story with no big jumps. We did not suddenly learn how to walk upright anymore than birds suddenly learned how to fly. The same is true with how we adapted to the environment in terms of the food we eat. Fruits did not “evolve” so we could eat them any more then we evolved to eat fruits.

 

We all recognize that salt, fat, and sugar have two things in common; they taste good and we require them to survive—survival of the fittest. In this case, “fittest” means our ancient ancestor learned to ingest things with food value. Although we could use any one of the three food elements Mika mentioned in her title, as an example to make my point concerning food preference, I will use sugar. As any dietician will tell you, some fruits have more sugar than another fruit. To condense millions of years of adaptation in to one sentence, we survived because we learned to seek food with the highest sugar content we could find. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives still eat leaves but obviously, they would prefer to eat fruit, if there was any. They preferred to eat the fruit because it tasted better. The reason the fruit tasted better is that it contained more sugar. The fruit with the highest sugar content tastes the best and the strongest in the group got the most—the strongest got he most because he or she is the strongest, which is why he or she is the strongest—the reference is to the never ending circle of greed as an innate trait universal to all biota.

 

In the raw world of survival, food was scarce. They were essentially always hungry and looking for something to eat, and as just explained, they preferred some food source to others. As our ancestors evolved from being hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, they did the obvious; they grew the most nutritious food—they were empirical nutritionists.

They also were industrialists. Just as they learned how to grow the most nutritious food, they eventually learned how to preserve food and make it more nutritious.  That is no longer ancient history.

 

The point is that we now know how to manufacture pure sugar, fat, and how to mine salt. Read the above paragraphs carefully. You will only find positive food reinforcement in our evolution: we evolve always looking for food and we always prefer the best tasting food and innately want to eat all we can get. The only negative stimulus is satiety—we eat until we can eat no more then stop. The result is obesity and all the consequence of obesity. As Dr. Greg Gibson so eloquently wrote in his book, It Takes a Genome (Amazon Kindle.com), we did not evolve in an environment of food abundance; therefore, our bodies are not genetically equipped to handle floods of sugar, fat and salt. Obviously, the conflict is between our minds and our metabolism. Mika, if you let McDonald’s win, it is your fault not theirs.    

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