Research has revealed why humans prefer high-sugar, high-fat foods

A study published in the new issue of the American journal
suggests that the brain's lack of accurate judgment about the calorie and nutritional value of processed foods that are also rich in fat and carbohydrates, such as doughnuts, may be one of the reasons why modern people are prone to obesity.
team from the United States, Germany, Switzerland and Canada asked 206 subjects to use a certain amount of money to look at photos to select the most common foods they wanted to buy, and to scan their brains. It was found that the subjects preferred processed foods with both than foods that contained only fat or carbohydrates. Brain scans have shown that this combination activates the reward mechanism of the human brain more significantly.
, senior author of the study and director of the Center for Modern Diet and Physiology at Yale University in the United States, says organisms have evolved to judge the nutritional value of food and adjust foraging behavior. For example, mice do not risk being arrested and hunted to eat low-energy foods in the open.
, the brain determines the calories of fat and carbohydrates through different mechanisms. Most of the subjects were accurate in their fat judgment, but less judgment about carbohydrates. When the two nutrients are mixed together, the human brain overestimates its value, increasing appetite.
the researchers speculate that in ancient times, humans mainly hunted animals and collected plants for a living, with fewer fats and carbohydrates in their diets and rich in fiber. With the domestication of plants and animals, grain cultivation and dairy products, people's chances of eating fat and carbohydrates at the same time have increased, but processed foods like doughnuts, which are also rich in fat and sugar, have only recently emerged, so the brain has not yet developed a new response mechanism. (Source: Xinhua News Agency Zhou Zhou)