Over-eaters

 

Telegraph 4 March 23

 

1  How we became a nation of over-eaters 

1. As hunter-gatherers, humans evolved to seek out the most calorific food to survive. A few millennia later, our programming is backfiring.
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3. Are you weak and defenceless in the face of a sticky toffee pudding or a plate of chips? While treats are what make life pleasurable, there’s a sense that we’ve all lost our sense of proportion, certainly when it comes to food. One biscuit with a cup of tea at 4pm is eminently civilised; demolishing the whole pack, less so.
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5. We have become a nation of overeaters. Adults in the UK are consuming up to 50 per cent more calories than they realise, according to a 2018 study by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Men were found to be putting away 1,000 extra calories per day, while women took on 800 more than they thought.
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7. The result is that we’re bigger than we used to be. Go back to the 1970s and less than 3 per cent of adults in England were in the obese category. Jump to today and the most recent figures in the Health Survey for England 2021 estimate that 25.9 per cent of adults in England are obese and a further 37.9 per cent are overweight, but not obese.
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9. Since 1993, the proportion of adults in England who are overweight or obese has risen from 52.9 per cent to 64.3 per cent.
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11. One popular narrative is that we’re all ­eating too much because we have no willpower. While our ability to say no certainly plays a role, it is impossible to ignore the drastic changes in our food culture over the past 50 years.
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13. Those changes to when and what we eat suggest our problem with overeating isn’t solely down to our collective ­inability to back away from the biscuit tin. 
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15. “There is no scientific backing for the claim that somehow we simply lost our willpower in the past five decades,” says Steve Hendricks, author of The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and ­Science of Fasting.
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17. The best theory with some scientific support, he says, is that we’ve become fatter than we were because we’re doing exactly what evolution designed us to do, “which is to seek out the most calorically dense food, which is the tastiest”.

2  The hunter-gatherer stage

1. A recently published study in the journal Nature Neuroscience found that neurons in the part of the brain that control the fear response may also be responsible for the tendency to overeat fatty, sugary foods.
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3. Researchers discovered that a group of neurons in the amygdala – a part of the brain involved in experiencing emotions and decision-making – may also trigger hedonic eating (consumption of food just for pleasure and not to maintain energy homeostasis). 
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5. Our food choices, so it seems, are atavistic, going to the very core of what makes us human. 
   

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