Instinct Gone Awry

Regardless of your moral, ethical or religious standpoint, we humans are animals and we have certain instincts. Some of those instincts revolve around food. A beneficial instinct is taste aversion. We, and other mammals, tend to instinctively avoid eating foods that smell bad, or taste bitter. This prevents us from eating harmful food, or poison substances. An off-shoot of this instinct, is that if we eat something, then get sick, we probably won't want to eat it again anytime soon. I'm sure most of us know someone who says "I got really drunk on vodka once, and now the smell of it makes me feel sick.". In reality, it wasn't the getting drunk that put them off vodka, it was the raging hangover that triggered the subconscious in to deciding "Okay, you moron, obviously drinking all that vodka wasn't such a good idea, lets not do that again. Next time you go near that stuff, I'm not going to let you touch it".


Instinct can over-ride knowledge. For example, a common taste aversion is tomatoes. Many people can not abide the bitter taste of these fruity vegies, but will happily eat cooked tomatoes in sauces. This is because their taste aversion instinct works in overdrive. Even though they know tomatoes won't hurt them, their instinct tells them that they may be dangerous because of their bitterness. Cooking tomatoes often removes this bitterness, making them palatable. Every few years I try to eat a piece of raw tomato to see if I can handle it, but every time, I can't. I have a very strong reaction and can not bring myself to keep it down.

Nowadays, many of our natural instincts, which once kept us alive, no longer help us because we live in a time of plenty. These pain-in-the-butt instincts include, taking advantage of available foods, familiarity, preference for high energy foods, preference for quick energy foods and preference for salty foods.

When there is food around, we want to eat it, especially if it's tasty food. This is because when food was scarce in the time of our ancestors, we ate what we could, when we could. The better tasting it was, the better it was for us. Unfortunately, today, food is everywhere we look and the tastiest food is no longer all that good for us. We also tend to prefer foods that familiar to us. If it is a food we have had before, we know it's safe to eat, also it often provides us with comfort; we may have developed psychological connections with certain foods. For example, when you were a child, your mother may have always cooked a big stew with mashed potatoes on a cold winters night. Your brain came to associate cold nights with this meal and now as an adult this is what you crave for comfort. If you were given lemonade whenever you were sick, chances are this is what you feel like when you're sick as an adult. These connections can also develop as an adult (like many women, I want chocolate when I'm feeling down!), so it's not too late to try to make new healthy connections.

So why do we crave foods that are bad for us?

Because there was a time when they weren't bad for us. High fat food was hard to come by, and we needed all the energy we could get. When these foods were available, they were seasonal (such as nuts), or required hunting, which took even more energy. So we had to eat as much of these high calorie foods as we could, so that we could store the energy as fat to use up in times of scarcity. High sugar food, such as ripe fruit, provided quick release energy to help us in our daily labours and also provided us with vitamins and minerals. We developed this instinct to help us to locate these nutrients, but now we can still this craving with nutrition-free candy or sugary drinks.

Salty food is in high abundance nowadays, but there was a time when salt was relatively difficult to come by. Many of our body functions require salts, and if our blood salt level gets too low, the kidneys start getting rid of the body’s water to try to conserve our salt levels. This means we become dehydrated. In ancient times, this meant death. In modern times however, virtually every packaged food item contains large quantities of salt. This causes fluid retention, as the kidneys try to keep the blood salt level down by conserving water, high blood pressure and osteoporosis. The average westerner eats over twice the recommended amount of salt every day.

Okay, so it looks like we're doomed to be fat unhealthy. But I promise you, we're not. We can't change our instincts, but we can help ourselves by being aware of them. When you want that chocolate bar, ask yourself, "Why do I want this? Am I hungry? Do I need the energy?" If so, choose something your ancestors would have. Have an apple. Another important question to ask would be, "Am I eating this out of habit instead of hunger? Do I really need this or is there a wiser choice?". Over the next week I will be focusing on diet, what I want you to do, is to catch yourself out making an instinctive food decision, and change it to a positive food choice.

Xx Pandy

“There is no freedom like seeing myself as I am and not losing heart.” - Elizabeth J Canham