Why You REALLY Want to Eat That Thing That Your Doctor Warned You Not To

I’ve heard a lot of people complain about how “everything that is bad for your health always tastes good”. Or conversely, most of the foods that are healthy taste like dog turds sprinkled with dried shrubs. It’s true, of course. But aren’t the reasons quite obvious?

Let’s look at the why a human being might eat something on fairly regular basis:

1. It’s healthy
2. It’s tasty, or
3. It’s both healthy and tasty.

In other words, if something’s both unhealthy and doesn’t taste good, we WOULD NEVER EAT IT! Or to put it in yet another way, unhealthy food that isn’t tasty, is -- well -- not food. So we don’t even stop to consider it in any such argument. For example, arsenic. Terrible for your well-being and tastes worse than spoonful from hell. But that’s exactly why it isn’t food. I’m sure if arsenic tasted good enough, there’d be at least a bunch of people who’d be dying to have a swig at it. (Pun intended.) You’d hear stuff like, “Oh sure, it might kill us -- but what a swell way to go!”

So basically, the more unhealthy an item is, the better it has to taste for humans to have incentive enough to call it food.

Similarly, the more healthy an item is, the less necessary it is for it to taste good. Hence, a lot of health foods taste terrible. It’s all so obvious, I wonder why people still complain!