This information is based on personal experiences and general knowledge. It is not professional medical advice. Always consult a healthcare provider before making changes to your diet, lifestyle, or treatment plans. This content was created with the assistance of AI tools to ensure thorough research and readability.
The traditional medicinal view on obesity, as summed up nearly a century ago: “All obese persons are alike in one fundamental respect—they overeat.” While this may be true in a technical sense, it’s about overeating calories, not food. Our primitive urge to overindulge is selective. People don’t tend to lust for lettuce. We naturally prefer sweet, starchy, or fatty foods because that’s where the calories are concentrated.
Think about hunting and gathering efficiency. We used to work hard for our food. Prehistorically, it didn’t make sense to spend all day collecting foods that didn’t provide at least a day’s worth of calories. It made more sense to crave calorie-dense foods to maximize energy intake.
For example, if you were gathering edible items at a rate of one pound per hour and each pound had 250 calories, it might take you ten hours just to break even on your daily calories. But if you were gathering foods with 500 calories per pound, you’d be done in five hours and could spend the rest of the day working on cave paintings. This is why we evolved to crave foods with the biggest caloric bang for their buck.
Even today, studies show that four-year-old children naturally prefer calorie-dense foods. They choose bananas over berries and carrots over cucumbers. Is it just sweetness? No—children also prefer potatoes over peaches and green beans over melon, just as monkeys prefer avocados over bananas. This suggests an inborn drive to maximize calories per mouthful.
All the foods tested in this study had fewer than 500 calories per pound. But once you start introducing foods like bacon, cheese, and chocolate, which can reach thousands of calories per pound, our ability to differentiate calorie density becomes numb. These calorie-dense foods were unknown to our prehistoric brains. It’s similar to the dodo bird failing to evolve a fear response to predators or sea turtles crawling toward artificial light instead of the moon.
The food industry exploits this weakness by stripping crops down into almost pure calories: sugar, oil (pure fat), and white flour (refined starch). Fiber, which has zero calories, is removed in the process. For example:
- Turning brown rice into white rice removes about two-thirds of the fiber.
- Refining whole-wheat flour into white flour removes 75% of the fiber.
- Running crops through animals to produce meat, dairy, and eggs removes 100% of the fiber.
What’s left is CRAP: Calorie-Rich And Processed foods. As dietitian Jeff Novick puts it, calories are condensed in the same way plants are turned into addictive drugs like opiates and cocaine—through “distillation, crystallization, concentration, and extraction.”
These ultra-processed foods even activate the same reward pathways in the brain. MRI scans of people with “food addiction” show that pictures of chocolate milkshakes light up the same areas of the brain as videos of crack smoking do for cocaine addicts.
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But “food addiction” is a misleading term. People don’t lose control over food in general—they don’t compulsively crave carrots. It’s foods like milkshakes, packed with sugar and fat, that signal calorie density to the brain. Studies show that the foods most associated with cravings and loss of control are highly processed items like donuts, cheese, and meat—the very definition of CRAP. The least problematic foods? Fruits and vegetables. This may explain why people don’t binge on broccoli at midnight.
Animals don’t tend to get fat when eating the foods they’re designed to eat. One exception? A troop of baboons that stumbled upon a garbage dump at a tourist lodge. These garbage-feeding baboons weighed 50% more than their wild-feeding counterparts. Sadly, we can suffer the same fate by eating garbage foods.
For millions of years, before we learned how to hunt, our diets consisted mostly of leaves, roots, fruits, and nuts. Perhaps it’s time to cut out the CRAP and get back to our roots.
A key insight is that animal products are the ultimate processed food. All nutrition originates from seeds, sunlight, and soil. The essential amino acids in steak come from the plants the cow ate. Animals don’t make these amino acids; plants do. By eating whole plant foods, we not only skip the middle moo but also regain the phytonutrients and fiber lost when plants are processed through animals.
Even ultra-processed junk foods may retain a trace of fiber, but when plants are processed through animals, all fiber is lost.
If you’re familiar with my posts, you know I recommend eating a variety of whole plant foods, as close as possible to the way nature intended. For more guidance, check out Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen at NutritionFacts.org or his book and app, How Not to Diet. These resources also include 21 tweaks for weight loss, supported by science.
Pro Tip: You can find Dr. Greger’s books at your local library for free. If you choose to buy them, note that all proceeds go to charity.
Resource: Nutritionfacts.org
