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Imagine yourself eating a juicy burger, topped with a perfectly melted slice of cheese and nestled in a soft bun. Your brain experiences a sweet spike in pleasurable chemicals as your teeth tear through the carbohydrate exterior and sink into the fatty, proteinaceous core.
Given humankind’s long history of struggling to find food, it makes sense that people are highly motivated to hunt it down, and that we experience intense pleasure when we finally eat it. “[If] you never know when you can have your next meal, then it really pays to have a few extra kilos on your [body],” says Lauri Nummenmaa, a neuroscientist at Aalto University in Finland. Our brains are still wired to seek nutrients “even though food and nutrition [are] omnipresent ...
