There is a chemical in your brain called dopamine which is an important part of how we feel pleasure. Use of recreational drugs and alcohol causes a rush of this chemical and that is part of the pleasure we feel from using them. The problem is that regular use of such chemicals causes us to have lower levels of dopamine when we are not using them. We end up feeling a desire for the drug or booze to get our dopamine levels back up.
Diets high in sugar, salt, and carbs also causes a dopamine rush. When you eat that food regularly, it lowers your normal dopamine levels, just like drugs and alcohol do, if not to the same level. That is why you feel that craving. Eating such food occasionally is fine, but if you do it to often, you can literally get an addiction to it.
Edit to add -
You mentioned that fast foods are low quality and bad for you. That is true, but but only in high quantities. Fats and sugars were high value foods to our ancient ancestors. Fats are very high source of energy. You get more than twice the energy from a gram of fat than you get from a gram of carbohydrates or protein. Sugars are easily digested making them a source of quick energy compared to other carbs, fats, or proteins. Eating these kinds of foods gave us a survival advantage over those who didn't, at least until we learned the agricultural skills to make them easy to acquire. Now, many or most people can get such foods any time they want and though they no longer give us an advantage, and eating a lot of them is actually harmful in the long run, those ancient taste preferences still remain in our evolved programing.
You crave salt and fat because your body needs a little bit of these things to survive, but finding salt and fat out in nature is really really hard, so those cavemen that liked the taste of salty or fatty foods enough to make the extra effort to find those foods were more likely to survive to be your ancestors and you inherited that behaviour. That's why you like McDonald's, it's full of the salt and fat that is hard to obtain if your diet consists of mostly roots and mushrooms and leaves.
McDonalds is bad for you because it's unnaturally full of salt and fat. Far, far more than your body needs and far more than your cavemen ancestors would have eaten naturally. Especially if you eat McDonald's often. Too much of anything turns that thing into a poison.
McDonald's has only been around a generation or two. That's not enough time for the people who crave McDonalds and eat too much of it to die off, leaving mostly people who don't crave McDonalds to remain.
Like-- every step of the way, fast food places have an opportunity to aim for 'healthier' or 'more delicious' choices, overwhelmingly with profit-making in mind. That's the main thing to keep in mind.
IIRC, McD's and various other chains even design venting and such to get the smell of the cooking food (chemically enhanced) in to the surrounding area. You know, so that more people can pay a fortune to get a food rush that doubles as a health disaster.
Because your diet sucks. A few months of eating only unprocessed food and you'd probably eat McDonald's exactly one more time in your life
And I do specifically mean McDonald's... It's uniquely disgusting, even among fast food. It tastes like it's reconstituted food scraps doped with sugar
As someone who is trying to climb out of this hole, I can back up your sentiment.
Being acclimated to shitty food, and thinking flavor is just sharp strong sensations in your mouth is one thing that perpetuates over consuming fast food. Your brain gets trained to crave the dopamine rush that the sensations of fast food briefly cause.
I know and I'm a huge fan of Mike Myers but once I watch it I can't un Watch it so it's like I'm saving it for a bad day when I need to be cheered up. But you're right tomorrow is not promised, I should make hay while the sun is out
Because sugar, fat and salt in those quantities are literally addictive. Our human/monkey brains were wired for survival, not overall health. Eating a large source of those three would've been a massive help in surviving winter when our next meal wouldn't be guaranteed.
A very large culprit is your gut's microbiome (the bacteria that live in our gut). The more junk food you eat, the more you will grow your craving for it.
I’m not sure how much of it is microbiome related, but as someone who’s fallen into pretty bad junk food benders, I can absolutely concur that it’s self-fulfilling. I’ve spent hours awake staring at the ceiling in bed after eating what should be a fulfilling square 2,000 calories thinking about junk food.
The more you have the more you will crave it. There is a point where no part of you wants any junk food, but you have to abstain from it for a good while. You can crave the beans and the ground beef in your fridge, OP! You can absolutely find yourself craving a refreshing salad or a comforting baked potato. You learned to crave junk food, you can learn something else, even if it’s not as chemically engineered to make you want more of it. You can find yourself forcing down junk food in a simultaneous fit of disappointment and compulsion - if you’re forcing leafy greens down it’s at least not as existentially taxing.
I’ve also found success in surrounding myself with snacks or herbal teas that feel healthy. Yes a nut bar is full of sugar and calories, yes a fruity infusion won’t actually improve your health. Yes that extra goat cheese or can of sweet corn or tuna on the salad is making it heavier. But there’s nothing bad about finding more angles of attack to pull yourself away from the black hole that is fatty sugary oily super processed food.
I feel like junk food addiction is hard to talk about since you can get laughed at for it, it’s not crack, it’s a fucking hamburger. Nobody wants to hear about a grown ass man talk about how his willpower is surrendered to tendies. It’s fucking awful because food isn’t something you can quit cold turkey. So you have to go through a process of fending off cravings and that can be mentally annoying.
There’s also things around it that feel silly to discuss: being able to schedule and manage cooking and storing your own food, buying the right ingredients in the right amounts without finding a mold culture in your fridge twice a month, it can feel like you have to fight on many fronts. That’s where you really do need to figure out what works for you.
I get the spirit of what you're saying, they're all habit forming, but fat and sugar (IE: carbohydrates) are macronutrients our bodies need to survive. Obviously they're not needed in the quantities that are available to us in modern society, but our biological desire to seek out high calorie foods is a survival mechanism rather than what happens with other habit forming substances like tobacco.
I don't mean to nitpick here but I feel like that distinction is important because saying "sugar and fat bad" without a little nuance can miss lead folks that aren't properly educated on nutrition, which in my experience is a large portion of my fellow Americans.
Edit: just wanted to add here that there's another comment by someone else who more or less states the same thing, but makes that distinction and I have no problem with it.
They has test kitchens and spend a ton of money on R&D to create that craving plus all the cartoon characters and kids toy’s and sponsoring school events gets kids hooked young.
I know about a funky thing where if you have equal amounts of sweet, salty, bitter, umami and sour you feel less full after eating it. It might be completely unrelated though.
Glutamate, it's an analog for an important brain signaling amino acid. Many people get drowsy or get blurred vision from MSG, but industry has funded influencers and bots for years telling us that is a myth.
fun fact, the 2k calorie diet is absolute bullshit and the FDA themselves said it shouldn't be taken as "anything over this threshold is bad".
They aren't good for daily intake
says who? if fast food is the only food you can afford and you don't own a kitchen, that is the healthier option to take because the alternative is starving.
But they're not meant to be your daily meals.
Humans also weren't meant to work 2 jobs and 14 hour days and yet living under capitalism, your diet adapts to your environment in order to help you make it to the next day.
What do you mean you can't buy an electric burner? What do you mean you can't cook even something as basic as a mac and cheese dinner meal? What do you mean you can't simply just look up how to cook things? I don't understand! null
how many homeless people have you given cash to so they can fulfill your fantasy of living a healthy upstanding citizen's lifestyle? do you give out hot meals to people in need? if not, stfu and stop being sinful by judging people in need
Because we didn't evolve to live in lands of abundance. We evolved in scarce conditions and are attuned to that.
Food that delicious and high calorie would not be constantly available in the wild, so if we ever found anything close, it would be beneficial to eat as much as possible to store up calories and survive during periods of scarcity.
You haven't aged enough to where it feels like you have a rat trying to chew through your colon from the inside out when you eat it. That will cure you of the addiction right quick.
It's more expensive than much better alternatives, it doesn't look good, and it tastes worse, like the cheapest ultraprocessed crap you can find in the kind of budget supermarket that only carries foreign brands you've never heard of.
I can find better and cheaper food in seedy bars I'd never willingly go to, or by buying the cheapest brands (even the good brands or fast food joints, or buying natural ingredients, wouldn't be significantly more expensive) and cooking at home.
It really boggles my mind. Is it like smoking? Do people start eating it due to peer pressure and never stop because they get addicted?
You could feed a family of 4 for a week on the cost. It has no nutritive value in addition to no flavor. It's like some type of dystopian government food paste.
They don't mix in nicotine, no need for all of that when MSG exists. They do mix in MSG to the meats and cheeses. Pretty much all fast food does, because it makes it addictive, and tasty.
I didn't have Chinese food until my wife, then girlfriend, introduced it to me in my twenties. A Chinese restaurant was opened in my small hometown when I was in my teens, but we never partook. I'm not sure why.
I didn't cook until, again, my teens, but at that point I literally had to ask how to boil water for hot dogs. My family was fairly progressive, so "Chinese salt" never came up, but MSG was definitely beyond me.
Having a reaction to a food additive is not racist. You are parroting the bots spread forth by a $7B industry. MSG reaction is real. Do we call people who get food allergies racist?
Yet, everyone I know that had so called reactions to MSG in Chinese food could eat Pizza Hut and McDonald's which both use MSG and they never had a 'reaction.'
They also haven't complained about MSG since the late '80s. There may be some people that have an actual allergy to MSG, but I have yet to meet one, and I have a much higher sampling of people to pull from than most.
Industrial chefs have turned food from art to science. The optimize every aspect to reach the "bliss point" on making food satisfy tastes while using cheapest ingredients possible.
In all that, there is no consideration of nutrition. Interestingly, the bliss point changes for people in different regions who have been exposed to a bliss point for a long time. An example is British candy which is too sweet to sell anywhere else. American food is considered overall disgusting to Europeans.
The science behind it is deep and rooted in the neuroscience of addiction. In the end, the worst possible diet anyone can have is any restaurant food, because it's not designed to feed, it's designed to sell.
In a hunter gatherer, surviving in the wild sense.
In a survivalism situation, stuff like salt and fat and sugar are rare, hard to come by, and your body needs then to survive.
This is why they taste really, really good.
Humans are smart though, and we made it so that we can get all the food we need and more.
But we still have the same survival programming that's telling us that salt, fat and sugar are rare, even though we can get those easily.
So we eat way too much of the stuff, because our brains are telling us it's rare and to get it while we can.
Fast food companies know about this and use it to get you hooked on their food, and have scientists and psychologists fine tuning every aspect of the food, packaging, restaurant and advertising to make their brand as addictive as possible.
So even though fat, salt and sugar are actually healthy in smaller amounts, too much is bad for you, but monkey brain doesn't know that and capitalism exploits that fact.
It's also that these things have really bad ratios of satiation signifiers to calories. If you try to go full "ape found a ripe tree with nobody around" on fresh fruit, good luck. If you really gorge yourself you might be able to eat 3-4 pomegranates in a sitting, or like 5-6 apples. Lots of fiber and lots of nutrients tell your body to slow down and that you've had enough. Your body wants to get a bit fat, but it's not looking to eat every remotely scarce food it can get. That said, yeah drenching something in fat and salt can change the equation. It's a lot easier to eat several potatoes fried than the same number baked.
77 replies
The same reason people will logically understand that crack is bad for them but crave it like crack
This is actually shockingly remarkably true.
There is very little to differentiate your addiction to junk food and your addiction to sex or your addiction to crack rock.
No no, they're much different. It's totally legal to be addicted to McDonald's and sex.
McDonald's fries have crack in them.
There is a chemical in your brain called dopamine which is an important part of how we feel pleasure. Use of recreational drugs and alcohol causes a rush of this chemical and that is part of the pleasure we feel from using them. The problem is that regular use of such chemicals causes us to have lower levels of dopamine when we are not using them. We end up feeling a desire for the drug or booze to get our dopamine levels back up.
Diets high in sugar, salt, and carbs also causes a dopamine rush. When you eat that food regularly, it lowers your normal dopamine levels, just like drugs and alcohol do, if not to the same level. That is why you feel that craving. Eating such food occasionally is fine, but if you do it to often, you can literally get an addiction to it.
Edit to add -
You mentioned that fast foods are low quality and bad for you. That is true, but but only in high quantities. Fats and sugars were high value foods to our ancient ancestors. Fats are very high source of energy. You get more than twice the energy from a gram of fat than you get from a gram of carbohydrates or protein. Sugars are easily digested making them a source of quick energy compared to other carbs, fats, or proteins. Eating these kinds of foods gave us a survival advantage over those who didn't, at least until we learned the agricultural skills to make them easy to acquire. Now, many or most people can get such foods any time they want and though they no longer give us an advantage, and eating a lot of them is actually harmful in the long run, those ancient taste preferences still remain in our evolved programing.
We evolved for a life of scarcity, but now we live in a world of plenty.
based middle of the road, analytical, truthful and realistic take.
Came here to post this and found it already +1 to this being one of the main reason it's causing cravings.
If you want further reading look up information on the pleasure - reward circuitry in the brain.
Therefore, the cure for fast food addiction is recreational drugs and alcohol!
RFK, is that you?
Overactivate dopamine receptors and the receptors shut down, like all receptors. Lack of dopamine signalling is Parkinson's disease.
You crave salt and fat because your body needs a little bit of these things to survive, but finding salt and fat out in nature is really really hard, so those cavemen that liked the taste of salty or fatty foods enough to make the extra effort to find those foods were more likely to survive to be your ancestors and you inherited that behaviour. That's why you like McDonald's, it's full of the salt and fat that is hard to obtain if your diet consists of mostly roots and mushrooms and leaves.
McDonalds is bad for you because it's unnaturally full of salt and fat. Far, far more than your body needs and far more than your cavemen ancestors would have eaten naturally. Especially if you eat McDonald's often. Too much of anything turns that thing into a poison.
McDonald's has only been around a generation or two. That's not enough time for the people who crave McDonalds and eat too much of it to die off, leaving mostly people who don't crave McDonalds to remain.
As others have mentioned, dense carbohydrates and sugar are also attractive for the same reason.
Even more attractive is a combination of carbs and fat in the same food - which almost never occurs in nature.
They would have to die off before they reproduce
Or if they produced Infertile Offspring.
Grease, sugar, and a lot of chemicals.
Don't forget loads of salt!
Like-- every step of the way, fast food places have an opportunity to aim for 'healthier' or 'more delicious' choices, overwhelmingly with profit-making in mind. That's the main thing to keep in mind.
IIRC, McD's and various other chains even design venting and such to get the smell of the cooking food (chemically enhanced) in to the surrounding area. You know, so that more people can pay a fortune to get a food rush that doubles as a health disaster.
McDonald's smells like a dirty deep fryer, it's fucking disgusting.
I tend to feel the same, but those suckers certainly know their broad audience.
Everything is a chemical
Because your diet sucks. A few months of eating only unprocessed food and you'd probably eat McDonald's exactly one more time in your life
And I do specifically mean McDonald's... It's uniquely disgusting, even among fast food. It tastes like it's reconstituted food scraps doped with sugar
As someone who is trying to climb out of this hole, I can back up your sentiment.
Being acclimated to shitty food, and thinking flavor is just sharp strong sensations in your mouth is one thing that perpetuates over consuming fast food. Your brain gets trained to crave the dopamine rush that the sensations of fast food briefly cause.
It's amazing how you can eat 12 chicken nuggets with large fries and still feel like you haven't eaten anything.
Oh, I'd feel nauseous lol, those nuggets are so gross and I don't really like the fries
"Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smart arse!"
Is that Mike Myers? I still haven't seen so I married an ax murderer even though I own it
Yes it is. lol
Colonel Sanders
Why deprive yourself so? It's easily my favorite Myers film.
I know and I'm a huge fan of Mike Myers but once I watch it I can't un Watch it so it's like I'm saving it for a bad day when I need to be cheered up. But you're right tomorrow is not promised, I should make hay while the sun is out
Because sugar, fat and salt in those quantities are literally addictive. Our human/monkey brains were wired for survival, not overall health. Eating a large source of those three would've been a massive help in surviving winter when our next meal wouldn't be guaranteed.
To expand, in an fMRI, eating sugar lights up the same brain regions as cocaine.
A very large culprit is your gut's microbiome (the bacteria that live in our gut). The more junk food you eat, the more you will grow your craving for it.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202303/where-cravings-are-bred
I’m not sure how much of it is microbiome related, but as someone who’s fallen into pretty bad junk food benders, I can absolutely concur that it’s self-fulfilling. I’ve spent hours awake staring at the ceiling in bed after eating what should be a fulfilling square 2,000 calories thinking about junk food.
The more you have the more you will crave it. There is a point where no part of you wants any junk food, but you have to abstain from it for a good while. You can crave the beans and the ground beef in your fridge, OP! You can absolutely find yourself craving a refreshing salad or a comforting baked potato. You learned to crave junk food, you can learn something else, even if it’s not as chemically engineered to make you want more of it. You can find yourself forcing down junk food in a simultaneous fit of disappointment and compulsion - if you’re forcing leafy greens down it’s at least not as existentially taxing.
I’ve also found success in surrounding myself with snacks or herbal teas that feel healthy. Yes a nut bar is full of sugar and calories, yes a fruity infusion won’t actually improve your health. Yes that extra goat cheese or can of sweet corn or tuna on the salad is making it heavier. But there’s nothing bad about finding more angles of attack to pull yourself away from the black hole that is fatty sugary oily super processed food.
I feel like junk food addiction is hard to talk about since you can get laughed at for it, it’s not crack, it’s a fucking hamburger. Nobody wants to hear about a grown ass man talk about how his willpower is surrendered to tendies. It’s fucking awful because food isn’t something you can quit cold turkey. So you have to go through a process of fending off cravings and that can be mentally annoying.
There’s also things around it that feel silly to discuss: being able to schedule and manage cooking and storing your own food, buying the right ingredients in the right amounts without finding a mold culture in your fridge twice a month, it can feel like you have to fight on many fronts. That’s where you really do need to figure out what works for you.
This guy gets it.
I get the spirit of what you're saying, they're all habit forming, but fat and sugar (IE: carbohydrates) are macronutrients our bodies need to survive. Obviously they're not needed in the quantities that are available to us in modern society, but our biological desire to seek out high calorie foods is a survival mechanism rather than what happens with other habit forming substances like tobacco.
I don't mean to nitpick here but I feel like that distinction is important because saying "sugar and fat bad" without a little nuance can miss lead folks that aren't properly educated on nutrition, which in my experience is a large portion of my fellow Americans.
Edit: just wanted to add here that there's another comment by someone else who more or less states the same thing, but makes that distinction and I have no problem with it.
They has test kitchens and spend a ton of money on R&D to create that craving plus all the cartoon characters and kids toy’s and sponsoring school events gets kids hooked young.
It's science, I don't know the specifics of craving but I know they spent a lot of money to figure out how give you that feeling.
I'd guess sugar and fat, lots of both
I know about a funky thing where if you have equal amounts of sweet, salty, bitter, umami and sour you feel less full after eating it. It might be completely unrelated though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
Want to experience the ultimate in shitty comfort food?
Come to the UK, go into town, have a few beers, get drunk and then stop for a massive dirty kebab on the way home.
Fucking bliss
I saw on a fb reel a place that was serving bread with chips now? Like bread and fried potatoes? With salt. With ketchup.
Are you just describing a chip butty?
I love it when someone from outside the UK suddenly discovers for the first time what must be a strange combo but we eat regularly.
I say the same about the pizza truck in DC after 2am
fast food isn't bad for you, unless you eat only fast food for years. if you wanna recreate the MCD taste at home, try sprinkling MSG on your food.
Do I look like I know what an MSG is?
You can buy it in a bottle like spices. It looks like salt. I like to replace the regular amount of salt with 50% msg and 50% salt when cooking
Now I want a doormat with “monosodium gluta” inscribed on it
Unfortunately they did leave the e off the end, so unless you're Australian...
Magic Salt of God
Glutamate, it's an analog for an important brain signaling amino acid. Many people get drowsy or get blurred vision from MSG, but industry has funded influencers and bots for years telling us that is a myth.
MSG king of flawor (or so I hear)
Just go to the grocery store and buy some?
Makes Shit Good powder.
fun fact, the 2k calorie diet is absolute bullshit and the FDA themselves said it shouldn't be taken as "anything over this threshold is bad".
says who? if fast food is the only food you can afford and you don't own a kitchen, that is the healthier option to take because the alternative is starving.
Humans also weren't meant to work 2 jobs and 14 hour days and yet living under capitalism, your diet adapts to your environment in order to help you make it to the next day.
how many homeless people have you given cash to so they can fulfill your fantasy of living a healthy upstanding citizen's lifestyle? do you give out hot meals to people in need? if not, stfu and stop being sinful by judging people in need
Because we didn't evolve to live in lands of abundance. We evolved in scarce conditions and are attuned to that.
Food that delicious and high calorie would not be constantly available in the wild, so if we ever found anything close, it would be beneficial to eat as much as possible to store up calories and survive during periods of scarcity.
You haven't aged enough to where it feels like you have a rat trying to chew through your colon from the inside out when you eat it. That will cure you of the addiction right quick.
I don't get it.
I've tried McDonalds food.
It's more expensive than much better alternatives, it doesn't look good, and it tastes worse, like the cheapest ultraprocessed crap you can find in the kind of budget supermarket that only carries foreign brands you've never heard of.
I can find better and cheaper food in seedy bars I'd never willingly go to, or by buying the cheapest brands (even the good brands or fast food joints, or buying natural ingredients, wouldn't be significantly more expensive) and cooking at home.
It really boggles my mind. Is it like smoking? Do people start eating it due to peer pressure and never stop because they get addicted?
I don’t get it either. My wife loves the stuff but to me it’s in the uncanny valley of food. Unsettlingly almost, but not quite like food.
Advertising and peer pressure as teens.
You could feed a family of 4 for a week on the cost. It has no nutritive value in addition to no flavor. It's like some type of dystopian government food paste.
Crack tastes like shit too, and it's maybe even worse than McDonald's
When I was a kid, I heard two unsubstantiated rumors about McDonald's food:
I doubt that either are true, but if the latter were maybe it would answer your question.
Pretty sure you'd have to label nicotine content and age restrict it no matter how it's consumed.
Agreed, but I don't think the urban legend was claiming that they were doing this legitimately.
They don't mix in nicotine, no need for all of that when MSG exists. They do mix in MSG to the meats and cheeses. Pretty much all fast food does, because it makes it addictive, and tasty.
When I was a kid, I don't think I knew what MSG was, so this reasoning would have been lost on me.
When I was a kid the racist "MSG in Chinese food" panic was happening. I knew about Chinese salt when I started cooking around 6 or 7
I didn't have Chinese food until my wife, then girlfriend, introduced it to me in my twenties. A Chinese restaurant was opened in my small hometown when I was in my teens, but we never partook. I'm not sure why.
I didn't cook until, again, my teens, but at that point I literally had to ask how to boil water for hot dogs. My family was fairly progressive, so "Chinese salt" never came up, but MSG was definitely beyond me.
Having a reaction to a food additive is not racist. You are parroting the bots spread forth by a $7B industry. MSG reaction is real. Do we call people who get food allergies racist?
Yet, everyone I know that had so called reactions to MSG in Chinese food could eat Pizza Hut and McDonald's which both use MSG and they never had a 'reaction.'
They also haven't complained about MSG since the late '80s. There may be some people that have an actual allergy to MSG, but I have yet to meet one, and I have a much higher sampling of people to pull from than most.
Industrial chefs have turned food from art to science. The optimize every aspect to reach the "bliss point" on making food satisfy tastes while using cheapest ingredients possible.
In all that, there is no consideration of nutrition. Interestingly, the bliss point changes for people in different regions who have been exposed to a bliss point for a long time. An example is British candy which is too sweet to sell anywhere else. American food is considered overall disgusting to Europeans.
The science behind it is deep and rooted in the neuroscience of addiction. In the end, the worst possible diet anyone can have is any restaurant food, because it's not designed to feed, it's designed to sell.
The meat and cheeses are all loaded with MSG to make the food addictive, and tasty. Pretty much all fast food does this.
Yummy
Because it is good for you!
In a hunter gatherer, surviving in the wild sense.
In a survivalism situation, stuff like salt and fat and sugar are rare, hard to come by, and your body needs then to survive.
This is why they taste really, really good.
Humans are smart though, and we made it so that we can get all the food we need and more.
But we still have the same survival programming that's telling us that salt, fat and sugar are rare, even though we can get those easily.
So we eat way too much of the stuff, because our brains are telling us it's rare and to get it while we can.
Fast food companies know about this and use it to get you hooked on their food, and have scientists and psychologists fine tuning every aspect of the food, packaging, restaurant and advertising to make their brand as addictive as possible.
So even though fat, salt and sugar are actually healthy in smaller amounts, too much is bad for you, but monkey brain doesn't know that and capitalism exploits that fact.
It's also that these things have really bad ratios of satiation signifiers to calories. If you try to go full "ape found a ripe tree with nobody around" on fresh fruit, good luck. If you really gorge yourself you might be able to eat 3-4 pomegranates in a sitting, or like 5-6 apples. Lots of fiber and lots of nutrients tell your body to slow down and that you've had enough. Your body wants to get a bit fat, but it's not looking to eat every remotely scarce food it can get. That said, yeah drenching something in fat and salt can change the equation. It's a lot easier to eat several potatoes fried than the same number baked.