Question: If all the unhealthy things in soda and sweets and doughnuts etc. are so bad for you, why do we like the taste of them? Why doesn't are body reject them? Also- why do some kids hate some really healthy foods like broccoli and spinach and brussel sprouts if they are so good for you?! It makes no sense at all!!

Christina Pagel answered on 21 Jun 2013:

Good questions!
We like sodas, sweets and doughnuts etc because they all contain sugar – and most people like the taste of sugar!

The thing is that when humans were evolving (and up until quite recently – ie up until a few hundred years ago or even less), finding food was a constant effort for people and sugar was not that common (it was in fruit and honey but you don’t have much of it in meat, veg or bread). Since it’s a good source of energy for our bodies, it was good for people to eat sugary foods like fruit or honey when they found them – so we evolved to love the taste of sugar! Because sugar was never that common this was not a problem. THe problem now is that sugar is very easy to make and so we eat way more sugar than ever before and food manufacturers add sugar to all sorts of things because they know people love the taste. We never evolved to cope with so much sugar in our diet and having too much makes you ill through diabetes and by making it very easy to gain weight…

So, our taste buds haven’t kept up with the sudden huge amounts of sugar easily available and we still love the taste! Maybe in the future we’ll evolve to not like it!