Dessert: why do we always have room for it?
Dessert: why do we always have room for it?
Why do we always have room for dessert?
Happy Sunday!
How are you all? How is fall treating you? I am just a summer girlie, and the realization that we are moving into a dark winter makes me a bit sad.
Our genetics-based programme starts next Sunday!!! I have a good reason to be excited. I look forward to working with some of you on your health goals! If you are ready to figure out your PCOS this autumn and manage your symptoms, join me here.
Today, we discuss my favourite topic: dessert 🍪 and what we have in common with grizzly bears 🐻.
Imagine you’ve just had a lovely dinner at a nice restaurant with your girlfriends. The waiter comes around and asks, "Dessert menu?" You all look at each other, and in one look, you all say yes. You are very full, but who doesn’t have some room for something sweet?
Do you think the same behaviour would have happened if the waiter said: another round of your roast beef? Most likely, no.
There is a reason for it, and it’s part of our genetics and evolution.
Flashback to 50,000 years ago - you are dragging an antelope back to the village. It has cost you, metabolically speaking, 2000 calories to find, run after, and catch it. The equivalent of an antelope these days is getting your boss to reply to an email so you win that client and get paid. It might not cost you 2000 calories, but it is 1000 calories worth of stress.
When you finally get to eat the antelope, you eat to recuperate the 2000 calories you have spent chasing it. However, there is no guarantee that you’ll find another antelope for days, maybe a week.
This is when the reward part of the brain kicks in, driving you to eat more so there is storage energy to keep you alive till you find another antelope. But how do you get past the full stomach?
Your brain becomes more picky, it begins to crave more calorie dance foods, that take little energy to digest: free sugar and fat. Desserts!!
Protein requires the most energy to digest, with 30% of the calories ingested being spent on digestion. If you eat 100 calories worth of steak, 30 calories will already have been spent on digestion. Carbohydrates take between 5% and 10%. Fat, the most caloric-dense macronutrient, takes only 3% to be digested.
When it comes to picking something else to eat when you are full, your body will choose fat and carbohydrates to ensure it spends the minimum time on digestion with the maximum storage capacity: fats and carbohydrates. Desserts!
This mechanism kept us alive in the fast-famine cycles throughout history. I am not even talking about 50,000 years ago. I am talking about 100 years ago, during World War 2. Unfortunately, I am talking even about nowadays, where there is war and conflict. This mechanism might be keeping people alive as we speak.
Of course, this is a significant problem where food is abundant. We act as if we might go through a “famine” stage, but that never comes. I expect our genes to change this behaviour over time and potentially stop this mechanism as we realise we live in an abundance of food.
The grizzly bears
Surprisingly, we are not the only species that does this. Grizzly bears hit the salmon run in autumn with the intention of storing as much fat as possible for winter. When they first start, the bears eat the whole salmon. As they store more and more fat, they switch to eating only the skin and the thin layer that lies underneath made only of fat. So, whilst it’s not our type of dessert, it’s the exact mechanism.
Next time you order dessert when you are full, you will know what drives this behaviour.
If you want to understand more about your behaviour, symptoms, and body, join our programme starting next Sunday here.
See you next Sunday,
Francesca
References
Yeo, G. (2020). Gene eating: The science of obesity and the truth about dieting. Pegasus Books.