Because fat and sugar are drugs. People don’t usually think of them like drugs, because of the widely accepted, but very wrong, attitude that only illegal substances can be drugs. Sugar, fat, caffeine, alcohol or tobacco are all drugs. They all trigger a desirable chemical reaction in your brain, and all have addictive potential. At least 2 or 3 of them are also significantly more harmful to you than several types of actually illegal drugs.
And in general, though perhaps most strongly for drugs, many people suffer from the cognitive bias of “illegal=bad & legal=good. Automatically and by default”
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.
Because fat and sugar are drugs. People don’t usually think of them like drugs, because of the widely accepted, but very wrong, attitude that only illegal substances can be drugs. Sugar, fat, caffeine, alcohol or tobacco are all drugs. They all trigger a desirable chemical reaction in your brain, and all have addictive potential. At least 2 or 3 of them are also significantly more harmful to you than several types of actually illegal drugs.
And in general, though perhaps most strongly for drugs, many people suffer from the cognitive bias of “illegal=bad & legal=good. Automatically and by default”
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.