POPPING DOWN to the local supermarket to grab a few groceries may not feel like survival behaviour, but finding and eating food is hard-wired into our brains. We have to do it to stay alive. So how do our brains ensure that we continue to search for and consume food on a daily basis? Simple. When we eat food, our brains release chemicals associated with pleasure and feeling good. This guarantees that we will keep looking for and eating food day after day, no matter how monotonous the process becomes.
And herein lies the problem. In the past, when food was scarce, this highly adaptive system was a good thing. But now extremely pleasurable, mouthwatering food is readily accessible all around us 24 hours a day. A good proportion of the food we eat each day is still being consumed because we need the energy to keep going. However, many of us are choosing to eat food beyond this energy requirement, even when we’re full. We’re not eating for energy, but for pleasure.
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