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“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” How many times have we heard that?
And has anyone else noticed that what passes for “breakfast food” is the nutritional equivalent of Halloween candy? How did we get bamboozled into starting our day with snacks and dessert?
You can’t live like a predator if you start your day eating like prey.
Technically “breakfast” is your first meal of the day, whenever that is…but here I’ll use it in the popular sense of “a morning meal, eaten soon after waking”.
Our Paleolithic evolutionary context didn’t include artificial lighting—let alone late-night restaurants like Denny’s and Taco Bell. Humans can’t see well enough to hunt or forage in the dark, and even preparing food is relatively difficult (try cooking entirely by firelight sometime).
Furthermore, our Paleolithic evolutionary context doesn’t include chicken coops, granaries, dairy herds, or root cellars.
Therefore, it’s a reasonable assumption that our ancestors ate most of their food in the afternoon or evening. Game had to be found, hunted, killed, butchered, and usually cooked. Tubers and vegetables had to be found, dug, gathered, and prepared. So any “breakfast” eaten by hunter-gatherers would most likely have been leftovers from the night before—if they were lucky enough to have any.
For example, here’s a delicious Hadza “breakfast” of burnt monkey parts (skip to 1:35, or 0:45 for a demonstration of fire making):
It seems very likely that “breakfast” is a Neolithic invention—the creation of sedentary agriculturalists. No one knows the exact timing and size of meals in different agricultural societies throughout history, and I don’t put much stock in what passes for historical accounts…but it’s clear that we’re not going to reliably have food to eat soon after awakening unless we’ve got domesticated animals, or a storehouse of previously harvested and prepared grains or tubers. (Consider also the effort and cost of starting a cooking fire every morning, in addition to every evening.)
In support of this theory, I note that all of the traditional “breakfast” foods are from domesticated animals and traditional food crops. Eggs from chickens; bacon, sausage, and ham from pigs; milk from cows; oatmeal and toast and grits and porridge and hash browns. Red meat is infrequently eaten, and it’s considered unorthodox (or decadent) to eat hunted game like duck or venison for breakfast.
The Modern “Breakfast”: An Invention Of The Rich
As opposed to the leisurely life of hunter-gatherers, which usually involves dramatically less work than ours (the complete essay,the book, further discussion), farming is labor-intensive, and it usually starts at dawn with the rooster—so it’s not surprising that people would want to fuel up before beginning a long day of hard work. Historically, farmers seem to have eaten whatever food they had available: usually some sort of gruel, porridge, bread, grits, or previously cooked tuber…perhaps with meat if they were rich enough to keep animals, which most weren’t.
Keep in mind that most farmers throughout history were essentially slaves to their landowner, usually the king (cf. “serf”), if they weren’t explicitly enslaved. See the nomenclature in the Domesday Book: only the king could own property, and everyone else simply held it “of the King”.
(Much like all modern systems of government, in which “ownership” is merely the privilege of paying the government below-market rent in the form of property tax. But I digress.)
It gets worse. Early agricultural civilizations, all the way through Mycenean Greece, were, without exception, palace economies—systems in which everything anyone produced belonged to the god-king, and was taken from them and redistributed by the god-king’s representatives through the palace. Palace economies make North Korea look like a block party. (Further reading.)
In summary, the modern Western conception of the gentleman farmer and his family—owning their own land, keeping chickens, pigs, and a few cattle in addition to growing crops, living comfortably—has little precedent in history.
The modern American breakfast of bacon or sausage, eggs, toast, and hash browns is basically a variant of the full English breakfast—a creation of the British upper classes in the 1800s, which spread as lower strata of society became prosperous enough to afford it.
“To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day.” -William Maugham
Recap: “Breakfast” Isn’t What You Think It Is
Hunter-gatherers most likely ate breakfast infrequently, if at all. When they did, it was leftovers.
Farmers ate whatever they had, because they were performing hard physical labor all day.
The upper classes ate meat and eggs because they could, and modern Westerners eat it because we’re all rich by historical standards.
Science > Re-Enactment…But We Must Start Somewhere
It’s important to note that our eating habits shouldn’t be dictated by an attempt to re-enact the Paleolithic (an impossible task): they should be dictated by our biochemistry and controlled, randomized trials. However, since we all have to eat something while waiting for the trials to finish, and we must choose some point of departure for constructing our theories, I choose our multi-million year evolutionary history as hunters and foragers—not a few thousand years of agriculture, or less than one hundred years of industrial products like ‘vegetable oil’.
My conclusion: since the Paleolithic is our evolutionary context, humans are most likely well adapted to not eating breakfast at all. Are you really all that hungry when you wake up—or are you eating because you think you’re supposed to?
Is Breakfast Really The Most Important Meal?
Like many homilies and pieces of pseudo-medical advice, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day” isn’t based on any evidence: it’s spoken by Gregor Samsa’s father in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”.
“Drink eight glasses of water every day” is another piece of scientific-sounding advice with no basis in fact…but that’s another article for another time.
The Full English, or its American variants, are indeed a creation of the rich—but they at least have the benefit of being nutritionally complete and mostly made of real food. Skip the toast, cook your eggs and hash browns in butter or coconut oil, and you won’t be hungry again for a long time, maybe even dinner. Same with a 3-egg omelet and other American diner fare, like steak and eggs.
But that’s not what people eat anymore. Few of us have time to fix such elaborate fare in the morning—and if we did, we simply aren’t hungry enough to eat it so soon after awakening.
What do we eat now, for breakfast?
Dessert and snacks.
Let’s look at today’s typical breakfast foods:
Pancakes with syrup, donuts, cinnamon rolls, “breakfast danishes”: Those aren’t foods, they’re desserts.
Bagel, toast, muffin, English muffin: giant balls of “carbs”, i.e. chewy, crunchy sugar. Did you know that bread—even “heart-healthy” whole-wheat bread—has the same glycemic index as Skittles?
Cold cereal: like bread, it hits your bloodstream even faster than white sugar. Yes, even Grape-Nuts and all those “healthy”, “high-fiber” cereals that taste like ground-up twigs…adding white sugar to your cereal actually drops the GI!
Orange juice, all fruit juices: liquid fructose. Basically a soda with some vitamin C. Have you ever seen how many oranges it takes to make a glass of orange juice?
Oatmeal: a bit of incomplete protein and lots of ‘carbs’ (sugar). Do you eat plain oatmeal? Really?
How about complete protein? And essential animal fats? The nutrients we absolutely require to grow, repair, and maintain our body and brain?
What do you call nutritionally incomplete food? A snack.
Is there any science behind the push for breakfast? Are we just “doing it wrong”? How did we get bamboozled into starting our day like prey? And what can we do about it?
Do you have opinions? Do you know people with opinions? Yes, you do. Leave a comment, use the buttons below to share this article, and get ready for Part 2!
Many of my articles and essays are inspired by offhand comments which I’m inspired to expand on or debunk, like this one:
> But the nurture side is the whole point of the history of
> civilization, i.e. trying to control the animal instincts of humans to
> build a better life.
This common view takes many forms: “We’re all just a bunch of monkeys” is popular, as is the cynical invocation of “human nature”. Even Richard Dawkins falls prey to it when he writes about our supposedly unique ability—and, in his mind, imperative—to transcend our genetic heritage.
The unspoken assumption, of couse, is that humans are intrinsically foul, selfish, short-sighted creatures, and only with the blessings of civilization can we begin to transcend our bestial nature.
This common view is exactly backwards.
These “animal instincts of humans” are not something civilization can ever overcome, because they are not our instincts at all.These behaviors are caused by living in what we call “civilization”.
Ardipithecus ramidus, ~4.5 MYA. What sort of selection pressure would turn him into us? Hint: not the ability to digest grass seeds.
Note that when we say “civilization”, we actually mean “agriculture”—as if nothing at all happened during the millions of years before people were forced to start planting and eating nutritionally inferior grains due to overpopulation and resource exhaustion. These are the same millions of years that shaped small-brained, tree-dwelling, quadrupedal apes into Homo sapiens; the effects of a few thousand years of agriculture are trivial by comparison.
Here’s Robin Hanson on the characteristics of foraging societies. (Note that this means “every human and proto-human that has ever lived, including your ancestors and mine, up until a few thousand years ago.”)
“Using an existing dataset aggregated from diverse ethnographies, we collect statistics on the social environment of the studied cultures which most closely resemble our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Such foragers have neither formal class stratification nor slavery. While private property is usually present, most forager societies have no rich, and none have any poor or dispossessed.
Food sharing is always common. Compared to the most “modern” societies in the larger sample (which are different from us today), disease stress is similar, suicide and murder are rare, conflict casualty rates are lower, and fewer believe in an evil eye. Violence is never over resources, and when enemies are driven from a territory no one uses that territory.
A person wronged always directly punishes the guilty; they never use a third party. If there is a substantial dispute, one side will likely leave the community. Leaders carefully cultivate support before acting, and none have a formal leadership position. Polygamy is always allowed and usually socially preferred. Co-wives either live together or one lives with a husband while the rest live in entirely different bands. On average, about 35% of men have more than one wife, and 50% of women are in a polygamous marriage (vs. 3% and 7% in modern societies).
People are expected to have premarital sex, which is usually common. Extramarital sex is also usually common, though it is usually not acceptable for women. Adults talk about sex openly. While wife-beating exists, divorce is easy. Boys and girls are equally preferred, and women are considered equals of men.
Mothers are usually the main, but not only caregiver of kids. Relative to modern societies, kids are taught more to be generous, trusting, and honest. Parents more emphasize their love for kids, and kids are never punished physically. Adolescents sleep away from their parents.”
Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it?
It seems that “uncivilized” people act far more “civilized” than we do! Presumably using their “animal instincts”, which are the same as ours—because those instincts have been selected for by millions of years of living as hunter-foragers.
(For anyone tempted to dismiss Robin Hanson as a hippie or Luddite: go visit his webpage. He’s a tenured professor of economics at George Mason University, a research associate at Oxford, and the chief scientist at Consensus Point. Did I mention the masters degree in physics?)
“The hunting and gathering adaptation, especially in its mobile form, does not appear to promote large-scale warfare, not only because groups are small, but because incentives are largely absent. Monogamy is the most common marital form (probably because women depend on men’s meat contribution and it is difficult to support two wives), so there is less incentive for bride-capture warfare. There can be territorial conflicts, but nothing in comparison to the conflicts that occur over precious lands when agriculture becomes the dominant way of life.
The scope for warfare has changed considerably as human economic systems have changed. Once people settle and the value of land varies from place to place, large-scale warfare becomes a persistent feature of human behavior, almost exclusively practiced among men. The riches to be had from control over productive river valleys (such as the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile) not only led to large-scale warfare but also to extreme differences in power and status, harems, and rape of women during and after war.“
“In sum, if warfare were prevalent in early prehistoric times, the abundant materials in the archaeological record would be rich with the evidence of warfare. But the signs are not there.“
In other words: the moment we settled down and became dependent on the accrued labor we invested into a specific plot of land and group of animals, someone came along and said “Do what I say or I burn your house and crops, kill your animals.” Then someone else came along and said “We’ll protect you from the barbarians…IF you give us half of what you grow and your youngest daughter,” and suddenly we had governments, taxation, slavery, armies, a privileged elite class—and war.
To summarize: the behaviors we call “uncivilized” are, in reality, entirely caused by what we call “civilization”. Until we understand that, all our efforts to “civilize” ourselves, to “control our animal instincts”, are doomed to dismal failure—
—because they create the very behaviors we hope to prevent.
—
It is no longer polite to state this truth so boldly: previous generations were much more frank. Here’s Alexander Ross, a European, writing about the Métis buffalo hunters of Manitoba in the late 1700s:
“These people are all politicians, but of a peculiar creed, favouring a barbarous state of society and self-will; for they cordially detest all the laws and restraints of civilized life, believing all men were born to be free. In their own estimation they are all great men, and wonderfully wise; and so long as they wander about on these wild and lawless expeditions, they will never become a thoroughly civilized people, nor orderly subjects in a civilized community. Feeling their own strength, from being constantly armed, and free from control, they despise all others; but above all, they are marvellously tenacious of their own original habits. They cherish freedom as they cherish life. The writer in vain rebuked them for this state of things, and endeavoured to turn the current of their thoughts into a civilized channel. They are all republicans in principle, and a licentious freedom is their besetting sin.”
A strong, capable, well-armed, and consequently free people? “The writer in vain rebuked them for this state of things, and endeavoured to turn the current of their thoughts into a civilized channel.”
The Hadza do not engage in warfare. They’ve never lived densely enough to be seriously threatened by an infectious outbreak. They have no known history of famine; rather, there is evidence of people from a farming group coming to live with them during a time of crop failure. The Hadza diet remains even today more stable and varied than that of most of the world’s citizens. They enjoy an extraordinary amount of leisure time. Anthropologists have estimated that they “work”—actively pursue food—four to six hours a day.
… The Hadza recognize no official leaders. Camps are traditionally named after a senior male (hence, Onwas’s camp), but this honor does not confer any particular power. Individual autonomy is the hallmark of the Hadza. No Hadza adult has authority over any other.
…
Gender roles are distinct, but for women there is none of the forced subservience knit into many other cultures. A significant number of Hadza women who marry out of the group soon return, unwilling to accept bullying treatment. Among the Hadza, women are frequently the ones who initiate a breakup—woe to the man who proves himself an incompetent hunter or treats his wife poorly.
…
I don’t care if this sounds maudlin: My time with the Hadza made me happier. It made me wish there was some way to prolong the reign of the hunter-gatherers, though I know it’s almost certainly too late.
Of course it made the author happy: for the millions of years that shaped us from apes into humans, we have been continually selected for our ability to live like the Hadza!Hunting and gathering on the African savanna is, quite literally, what humans are for. Everything we’ve done in the few thousand years since agriculture is a hack, a makeshift repurposing of that basic machinery of survival. It’s like using a Formula 1 car to pull a plow.
We have forced proud, fierce, meat-eating, pack-hunting, ruthlessly egalitarian predators to sow and weed and reap, head down, hands to the plow and computer desk and cash register. We eat the birdseed we harvest, instead of the animal flesh that made us human. We give up our hard-earned surplus to the government or the corporatocracy or the King, and we obey every whim of their agents of authority on pain of imprisonment or death. And since authority claims every inch of the Earth, we can no longer leave tyranny, stupidity, or blind tradition behind to risk a new way of living—the act that separated us from the chimpanzees and made us human. We must fight its power or submit.
And we wonder why being clean and fed and comfortable doesn’t make us happy.
Once again: the behaviors we call “uncivilized” are, in reality, entirely caused by what we call “civilization”. Until we understand that, all our efforts to “civilize” ourselves, to “control our animal instincts”, are doomed to dismal failure—
—because they create the very behaviors we hope to prevent.
Live in freedom, live in beauty.
JS
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Rephrased for modern humans: Predators eat meals, prey grazes on snacks. This means you need to eat meals which will carry you through to your next meal, but that won’t make you tired or sleepy.
So why is it so difficult to stop snacking? Why is snack food so uniquely addicting? Why can we demolish entire tubes of Pringles, boxes of donuts, trays of chocolates, and bags of goldfish crackers, when we would never finish the same number of calories in the form of meat and vegetables?
It’s because snack food is a magic trick, played on our senses of taste.
Note: This article will help you understand what’s behind the concept of “food reward” that’s been making the rounds lately.
How Our Tastes Evolved: Understanding The Basic Tastes
Our tastes have been selected, over millions of years, to enjoy foods that are nutritious for us, and to dislike foods that are poisonous or not nutritious. Any humanoid whose tastes were not in accordance with healthy eating—for instance, an inability to distinguish plant toxins, or a lack of preference for calorie-dense fat over lean protein which we have a limited ability to process—would have died out over the hundreds of thousands of generations that separate us from our quadrupedal, forest-dwelling ancestors.
Here’s an excellent discussion of our taste receptors and their probable evolutionary purpose, adapted and modified from this intriguing article: “Why Did We Evolve A Taste For Sweetness?” by the Drs. Jaminet:
The five basic human tastes are sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Each taste detects either a nutrient class we need or toxins we should avoid.
Sweet: sugars. Mother’s milk, sweet fruits. Possibly also hydrophobic (fat-associated) proteins, i.e. a fat sensor: it’s impossible to taste fat by itself because it won’t bond to taste receptors.
Salty: electrolytes. Sodium and potassium are necessary for life.
Sour: acids. Attractive in small doses (wild fruits, lightly fermented food), aversive in large doses (spoiled food high in bacterial fermentation products).
Bitter: toxins. Again, usually OK in very small doses (e.g. cruciferous vegetables) but aversive in large doses.
Umami: glutamate (and some nucleotides). Basically a protein sensor.
The key to understanding snack food is to understand what foods were available to us in the Paleolithic, so that we can understand what our tastes are for. It’s impossible to overdose on sour or bitter because they’re aversive in large doses, so that leaves us with sweet (which also helps detect fat), salty, and umami.
Let’s examine fat: there was no such thing as “vegetable oil” (actually seed oil) in the Paleolithic. The only year-round source of dietary fat was animals, with nuts a secondary, seasonal source. Therefore, our taste for fat is primarily a taste for animal fat—including all the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K2-MK4) found in animal fat, and for which fat is necessary to absorb.
A wild banana. Small, starchy, and mostly seeds.
Sweetness was limited by lack of availability. Paleolithic fruits were much smaller and more bitter than modern varieties, which have been bred for sweetness and seedlessness to the point of being unable to reproduce without human help—and they would not have always been available at their peak of ripeness, as they’re eaten by many other animals too. Honey has always been rare. And as the Drs. Jaminet note, it is entirely possible that sweet taste receptors do double duty as animal fat detectors.
Salt was difficult to obtain, except for those who lived near the ocean. And as Parmesan cheese and kombu dashi hadn’t yet been created, umami was limited to its natural source—meat.
In conclusion, we can see that our taste receptors are primarily geared towards obtaining fatty meat and salt, with nuts and sweet fruit as occasional bonuses. So it’s not surprising that we enjoy salty, fatty meat and sweet fruits.
Snacking: The Supernormal Stimulus Of Taste
“Supernormal stimulus” is a technical term for something that’s so much better than reality that we prefer it…
…even when it’s obviously fake.
Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz found many examples of this in animals. Mother birds prefer to incubate fake eggs made of plaster if they’re larger and more brightly colored than their own eggs. Male stickleback fish will attack anything with a red underside, including toy boats.
This is because, in the evolutionary history of birds and sticklebacks, there haven’t been enough curious ethologists with plaster eggs and red-bottomed toy boats to make it important for these animals to tell the difference. If it’s egg-shaped and in your nest, sit on the biggest one, because it’s most likely to survive. If it’s in the water and red underneath, attack it, because it’s most likely another male.
Niko Tinbergen painting some supernormal stimuli.
A supernormal stimulus for humans.
Humans are no exception: we’re vulnerable to supernormal stimuli, too. Photoshop gives men rippling abdominals and women exaggerated curves. Comic book heroes are just as unrealistic as the heroines. Round yellow smiley faces communicate emotion more clearly and simply than a picture of a smiling person.
And in the evolutionary time of humans, there hasn’t been enough refined sugar, seed oil, and MSG to make it important for us to tell the difference between them and real food.
Here’s a startling experiment: rats prefer saccharine and sugar to intravenous cocaine, even after previously becoming addicted to cocaine:
“…From day 7 onward, rats sampled lever C [cocaine] almost maximally, though slightly less than lever S [saccharin], before being allowed to make their choices (Fig. 1c). Thus, despite near maximal cocaine sampling, rats under the S+/C+ condition acquired a preference for lever S as quickly as rats under the S+/C- condition.”
…
“Our findings clearly demonstrate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and -addicted individuals.”
Characteristics Of Successful Snack Food
If you were to design a profitable and successful snack food, you’d want it to have several characteristics:
It would be made of cheap ingredients, allowing a high profit margin.
Since our government heavily subsidizes industrial grain production, you’d make them of grains and grain products…corn, wheat, and soy. Mostly corn, because it’s so heavily overproduced that we’re forced, by law, to feed it to our cars!
It would be shelf-stable and require no preparation, so that it could be kept without refrigeration, taken anywhere, and eaten at any time.
Therefore, you’d make it out of highly-processed ingredients that are shelf-stable, pump it full of preservatives so that it could survive for months in a vending machine, and enclose it in lots of disposable packaging so it wouldn’t get damaged in transit.
It would concentrate the tastes we’ve evolved to enjoy far beyond their natural amounts, and as much as our technology allows.
This would be the supernormal stimuli of fatty, salty, umami, and sweet: MSG, crystalline sugar, seed oils, fruit juices, “natural and artificial flavors”.
Finally, it would not be satiating.
No matter how much you ate, you would never be satisfied.
In other words, you’d create a movie set: something that looks like reality, but even better. More scenic, more exotic or mysterious or futuristic, more dramatically lit…
…and completely, utterly fake. The buildings have no interior, everything in the distance is just a matte painting or computer graphics, and it’s all built as cheaply as possible because it only has to last until the scene has been shot. All a movie set has to do is look nice for a few minutes, or a few seconds, from the right angle. You can’t live in a movie set, because that’s not what it’s built for…
…and you can’t live off snacks, because that’s not what they’re made for either.
The Magic Of Snacks, Part I: Taste Without Nutrition
Just as a movie set’s only constraint is to look good for a few seconds from a limited set of camera angles, a snack food’s only constraint is to taste good until it slides down your throat.
And that’s what technology allows us to do: create products (“snacks”) that tickle our taste receptors far more than real food can ever hope to—but that don’t come with the nutrition that selected us to crave those tastes in the first place.
This is the reason that the concept “eat whole foods, minimally processed” is generally sound: if whole foods taste good to us, it’s most likely because they contain nutrients we need, not because they’ve been engineered to tickle our taste buds. (Note that all modern fruits are heavily engineered products of thousands of years of careful breeding: read Dan Koeppel’s fascinating book “Banana” for a look at one typical example.)
The Magic Of Snacks, Part II: Taste Without Satiety
A pleasing taste isn’t enough to make an addictive snack food: as mentioned above, it must also be non-satiating. Steak and eggs are delicious—but we don’t have the urge to eat them until we’re sick.
There are many parts to satiety, but I’ll touch on what I believe to be the most important issue: protein satiation.
Protein Satiation
Complete protein is satiating. Our bodies absolutely require complete protein—but they also have a limited capacity to process protein in excess of our requirement. This shows up as what’s called “protein leverage”: people tend to consume food until they’ve ingested about 360 calories worth of complete protein. All other things being equal, if we eat foods high in protein, we consume less calories, and if we eat foods low in protein, we consume more. (You can read more about this issue in this AJCN article, and here.)
“Protein” is just chains of amino acids. “Complete protein” is protein containing all the essential amino acids—the ones we must eat because our bodies can’t make them—roughly in the proportions our body needs them.
Interestingly, egg protein is the standard by which protein quality is measured—probably because it takes the same kinds of protein (and other nutrients, like cholesterol) to make a healthy chicken as it does to make a healthy human. Any dietary advice that tells you to avoid eggs for any reason is, by definition, wrongheaded.
Therefore, if we want to sell an addictive and non-satiating food, we should keep it very low in protein (e.g. candy, cookies, potato chips). If it does contain protein, that protein should be incomplete—deficient in at least one essential amino acid—since the limiting factor for protein utilization is the least abundant essential amino acid.
Guess what? Corn and wheat, the foundation of chips, crackers, cookies, and over 90% of the breakfast aisle, are both deficient in lysine. And both zein (corn protein) and gluten (wheat protein) are prolamins, which are very difficult for our digestive enzymes to break down and decrease the digestibility of the associated starch.
In support of this theory, you’ll note that “energy bars” are more satiating than candy bars, despite having a similar taste and number of calories…most likely because they tend to contain some amount of complete protein. (Though they make up for it by costing twice as much. You could be eating prime rib for what energy bars cost per pound. Think about it.)
Fat: The Satiety Potentiator
Fat is not satiating by itself—but it increases the satiation of the protein it’s eaten with. This is because fat slows gastric emptying and increases GI transit time. (More information here.) This is one reason why we can eat entire tubes of Pringles, but only a few eggs: Pringles contain fat and carbohydrate, eggs contain fat and complete protein.
Unless, of course, you’re Cool Hand Luke…
In support of protein satiation, a large hard-boiled egg contains about 75 calories, so that superhuman (and fictional) feat would involve 3750 calories’ worth of eggs. A can of Pringles contains about 900 calories.
50 eggs is just over four dozen eggs…3750 calories is just over four cans of Pringles. What’s easier to eat…a dozen hard-boiled eggs, or a can of Pringles?
The Nutrient Leverage Hypothesis
We can take the protein leverage hypothesis even farther, by extending it to other necessary nutrients. The unjustly neglected blog Fat Fiction makes the startling claim that nutrient deficiency is responsible for the obesity crisis, and cites (among other sources) an intriguing double-blind, placebo-controlled study of feeding multivitamins to obese Chinese women:
“After 26 weeks, compared with the placebo group, the MMS group had significantly lower BW [body weight], BMI, FM [fat mass], TC and LDL-C, significantly higher REE [resting energy expenditure] and HDL-C, as well as a borderline significant trend of lower RQ [respiratory quotient] (P=0.053) and WC [waist circumference] (P=0.071). The calcium group also had significantly higher HDL-C and lower LDL-C levels compared with the placebo group.”
Anyway, I recommend you read Mike’s “Two Minute Summary”. I’m not sure nutrient deficiency is everything, as he seems to be saying—but I believe he’s got hold of an important piece of the obesity puzzle that has been neglected in the rush to blame everything on insulin, and I encourage others in the ‘paleo’ field to build on his work.
Conclusion: Snacking Makes You Fat, By Design
Another supernormal stimulus.
In conclusion, we can see that “snack food” is designed to make us fat—by giving our taste buds a supernormal stimulus, while withholding the nutrition that has always gone along with that stimulus in evolutionary time. Just like the greylag goose that tries to sit on an egg-colored volleyball, or the stickleback fish attacking a red-painted toy boat, we can’t resist shoving highly processed, brightly packaged non-foods like cookies, donuts, crackers, corn chips, bread, cereal, and candy bars down our throats—
—especially when our rational minds are short-circuited by the label “All-natural!” or “Contains heart-healthy whole grains!” Our livers don’t care if fructose comes from Fanta or apple juice, our pancreas doesn’t care if glucose overload is accompanied by indigestible fiber and plant toxins (“whole grains”), and our eicosanoid pathways can’t tell if they’re clogged with omega-6 fats from Cool Ranch Doritos or Organic Multigrain Rainforest Eco-Chips.
Don’t believe the hype. If it takes multiple layers of brightly-colored packaging and a $multi-million, multi-media ad campaign to sell it, it’s not food. No one has to put meat or eggs in a brightly colored box with a cartoon character on it. I’m just sayin’.
What Should Humans Eat?
Eat foods you could pick, dig, or spear. Mostly spear.
Live in freedom, live in beauty.
JS
Postscript: For those who want to know more, I explore our mechanisms of hunger and reward in detail in my epic series "Why Are We Hungry?" My older series on carbohydrate addiction starts here and explains some of its pathways.
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