The reason why healthy food doesn't taste good

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Have you ever wondered why what tastes good is often not healthy despite the fact that from evolutionary point of view the whole purpose of taste is to get you to eat what is healthy? I found an interesting explanation that probably none of you have thought of. On a grand scheme of things, what tastes better IS healthier:

1. Salad tastes better than dirt, and salad is healthier than dirt
2. Cookies also taste better than dirt and they, too, are healthier than dirt

Now, since the VAST MAJORITY of food available is dirt, ON A GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS the healthy things DO taste better than unhealthy ones. The problem is that correlation is not perfect. So one small "imperfection" in correlation is

3. Cookies taste better than salad BUT salad is healthier than cookies

Now, item 3 is VERY SMALL compared to 1 and 2. Just think about it: it is A LOT more unpleasant to eat dirt than any unpleasantness one would have eating salad. And it is A LOT worse to your health to eat dirt than it would be eating cookies,

But as "small" imperfection as it might be, the "imperfection" is all you are going to pay attention to. After all, since dirt is neither healthy nor tastes good, the dirt simply would never enter your mind. In order for item X to enter your mind, item X has to EITHER be healthy OR taste good or both. And here is what makes healthy food taste bad:

4. If item X is healthy (e.g. salad), it has a "qualification" to "enter human consideration" DESPITE bad taste
5. If item X tastes good (e.g. cookie) it has a "qualification" to "enter human consideration" DESPITE being unhealthy

This, together with the fact that

6. Most things taste bad and most things are unhealthy
7. Most things (e.g. dirt) never enters human consideration
8. The pattern exemplified by 1 and 2 is not perfect

provides an excellent statistical explanation why healthy things taste bad and unhealthy things taste good.

Lets put it this way: items 4 and 7 imply that

4, 7 ==> If an item X tastes bad and it enters human consideration, it MUST be healthy

Items 5 and 7 on the other hand imply that

5, 7 ==> If an item X is unhealthy and it enters human consideration, it MUST taste good

Finally, item 6 imply that

6 ==> Things that are BOTH healthy AND taste good are EVEN LESS common than things that are ONLY one OR the other (I mean, two "rare" things co-existing at the same time is even more rare)

(4, 7 ==>), (5, 7 ==>) and (6 ==>) above imply that AMONG THINGS THAT ENTER HUMAN CONSIDERATION there is "opposite correlation" between being healthy and tasting good

What's the point of this thread? First of all, humans are programmed to Like food that tastes sweet. Secondly, humans are (usually) programmed to like meat, eggs and so on because we need more proteins than other apes.

A lot of unhealthy foods (eg. wheat) has very little taste.

The increase taste is almost always a response to higher calorie count. The two main tastes most people go for is fatty foods and/or sweet foods, as these are the foods that are more calorie dense, and will provide more energy (e.g. an apple or slice of bacon will give you more energy than a handful of spinach). Which, if you are getting these tastes from naturally occurring foods, is a good thing in most cases.

It depends on whether somebody made a crappy salad. IMO a Cobb Salad with boiled egg and good grilled chicken in it and creamy Bleu Cheese dressing is better then a crummy cookie.

On the other hand if it's a bowl of iceberg lettuce with just vinegar yeah that kind of sucks.

Maybe I'm an odd duck, but sometimes I actually crave hard boiled eggs, salad, turkey, and other unprocessed "health" foods.
But I have also been on a strict primal/paleo diet for the past 5 years, and I can't remember the last time I ate anything processed or any kind of junk fast foods.
Your body adapts.
I enjoy my tuna fish salads as much as a fat kid enjoys cookies.

And what you said about the dirt-humans actually benefit from bacteria found in soil. The good bacteria in the soil helps our digestive systems run more efficiently. That's why children often attempt to eat dirt. ( I'm not saying to eat dirt, either, just proving a point).
I'm too lazy to find the science journal articles about this, but I'm not making this up.


(Evolutionary biology/nutrition is one of my special interests, as you can tell).

Maybe to you cookies taste better, but I personally think salad tastes better. In fact even as a child I thought it was stupid that adults thought if you're a kid you automatically like sweet cereal and other nauseating things because they taste 'good' well not to me.

In fact even with most things I find myself really enjoying healthier food more than unhealthy food....and I face digestive discomfort from too much of any sweets, even one bite of anything from Mcdonalds and I have to be careful of other fast food some I can tolerate, some makes me feel like crap.

I also like salads. I guess in my post I was trying to explain why "statistically" people tend to like cookies more. And that statistical question still stands even though the statistics has exceptions (such as myself).

Sugar is a helluva drug.

I think there are a few main reasons why statistically people tend to like the taste of unhealthy food more:

1)The food is healthy in the small amounts that it is found in nature and therefore we are wired to like its' taste so we will always eat it when we find it in nature. But it becomes unhealthy in large amounts. This would apply to sugar which is found in nature in small (and tasty) amounts but which reaches unhealthy levels at the extremes of a box of cookies.

2)The unhealthy food is an industrial simulation of a healthy food. The simulation tastes the same as the natural version (but is far cheaper) so our taste buds respond to it but it is unhealthy because our bodies aren't evolved to handle it. This applies to trans-fats, an unhealthy simulation of naturally occuring (and healthy) fat.

3)The food would be both healthy and tasty if it were handled properly but it isn't so it is neither. But even though it is neither healthy nor tasty, people perceive it as still being healthy (because that is how we have mentally labeled it) and so think that healthy food tastes bad. This applies to many fruits and vegetables that taste horrible after they are picked severly unripe and shipped long distances or grown unaturally. This leads to food that is tasteless and has a horrid texture and is lacking nutrients(hot house tomatoes are particularly awful) but people still mentally put it in the "healthy" box and then think they don't like healthy food. They would if they were standing right next to the plant and it was grown well and they ate it fresh from ripe picking.

4)The food isn't healthy or tasty but it is very cheap to make so marketers convince people it is healthy. Since people already have it in their heads that health=tasteless, it sells and perpetuates the health=tasteless meme. Example: rice cakes

Ever since eating a clean diet consistently for about a month, cookies and foods like them seem to be less and less interesting as time goes by. I think the only way I would eat a cookie now is if I smelled one fresh out the oven first, but even if I did eat the cookie, I would not enjoy the taste that much. I moved on to a cleaner diet, and yes healthy foods do taste fantastic once you have a few kitchen skills under your belt! Once I did I realized how unappealing those unclean kind of foods really are, when things going in me on a regular basis aren't bad for me, but actually are really good.

Somewhat on topic: Many animals eat dirt because they are heavily lacking vitamins and minerals. It has also been known that there are many tribes who live off the land, that also eat dirt.

I think it's important to remember that humans survived an ice age and a time when they had to be incredibly active in order to survive the elements, escape predators, and have enough to eat. That burned a lot of calories, thus a liking for sweets and fats. I've read that scientists working in Antarctica have to consume several thousand calories a day because of the cold. Eating enough actually becomes a chore, even if they really love food, and it takes some doing to adjust their appetites downward once they leave there.

There's also a possible argument for sweetness versus bitterness being something one would have to look for when foraging in order to tell edible berries from poisonous ones.

But we live in this era, when we need to adjust our eating patterns to our current environment - or die early due to health problems caused by obesity. Unfortunately or fortunately, whatever your point of view, medical science has advanced to the point that it interferes with evolution. Those who would have died when the human race was evolving to where we are now, would now be saved by medicine. It slows the evolutionary process down, so we haven't evolved to desire the right foods for us today.

That's just my not very scientific theory about this.

I've also read that a part of the problem with diabetes is that those who are pre-diabetic don't taste sweetness as acutely as others. But I've found, with my own eating habits, that if I avoid sugar, my taste adapts. Same with salt. If I deliberately use less sugar or salt for a while, I find I don't need as much of either in order to enjoy my food. This problem is compounded by the fact that packaged, prepared foods are jam-packed with sugars and salt. So, if we eat convenience foods or eat out a lot, we get accustomed to more salt and sugar without even realizing it.

Last edited by SpiritBlooms on 02 May 2012, 12:48 pm, edited 2 times in total.

To say that food that is good for you does not taste good is a lie. If you know anything about cooking all food can be cooked to taste good and can be healthy for you.

Your brain doesn't always know what's best for you.

This is very true snapcap

True! I remember the first time I ate broccoli was in a school cafeteria (in the 60s) where it had been boiled so long it was bitter. I thought I hated broccoli until I finally tasted it lightly steamed as a teenager. Now it's my favorite veggie of all. I love it prepared almost any way except BOILED TO DEATH.

As a child I never liked raddishes beats or coal flower until I started learning how to cook. Now I can make them taste good and it still be healthy for me too