Why The Junk Food Addiction is So Hard To Kick

I took the last couple of months off from writing to do some research on food as medicine. Shortly I’ll write on a handful of new studies and research that everyone should be aware of. At the moment, though, I thought I would get back into the swing of things by answering a question I’d received while on hiatus.

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Why is this addiction so hard to kick?

There was a point in our recent history when most Americans would have agreed that giving up smoking or a drug addiction would be entirely more difficult than giving up McDonald’s. Today, as I’m sure it’s obvious to most, the tide is turning. As more and more Americans find themselves struggling to lose weight, the plight of the overweight has become accepted. While I have absolutely no research to back this up, I would venture to say that the vast majority of people that quit eating junk food relapse. So why have we, an intelligent society, one that created math, antibiotics, and the Internet, found no way to successfully contend against junk food in our battle with the bulge?  

The answer is quite simple and probably very surprising to most.

The fact is that we’ve evolved innovatively faster than we’ve evolved internally. While human evolution is only observable over thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, our industrialization of food all took place within the last 150 years. So while in reality we may have access to supermarkets and drive-through fast-food restaurants, our brains are hardwired to think we’re still hunters and gatherers, food is scarce, and famine is coming. 

To survive famine our brains began to signal us, letting us know when a food source was high in calories and fats. By eating as much as we could manage, we would then be able to store these calories as body fat and use them for energy when no food was available. Meat in particular was more scarcely available and, as it may have taken days to hunt and only hours to spoil, our brain takes its time before telling us we’re full when there is meat available, allowing us to push the limits of what we can actually eat. The real problem is that today we have more food than we know what to do with, an instinct to eat as much as we can, and an evolutionary trait that sends it right to our thighs. All of this makes high-calorie junk food a hard addiction to kick, as well as a health problem leading to our destruction. 

The solution isn’t as easy as waiting for evolution to catch up. That day may very well come, but first we’d have to survive that long and weight-related health problems are a huge obstacle standing in our way. It won’t be easy, but we have to start by recognizing that overeating and obesity are entirely normal yet, unfortunately, very unhealthy. From there we can try and rewire our brains manually and recognize consciously when it’s directed us to do something that may kill us. We evolved to survive and now we must survive if we ever hope to evolve.

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