Why do we like sweets?

Thanks to @saramic for this idea.

This question came up because of a poem I wrote sometime back about cream cake.

The question goes back to how we evolved to develop basic tastes: Sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Sweet taste involves carbohydrates. The last item, umami, involves glutamates and nucleotides.

The reason we like sweets is because there is a complicated connection between our brains and our taste buds, which reside in our tongues. What makes it complicated is that sugars are not the only things that activate our sweet buds. The compounds associated with fats also do that.

The sweet taste is balanced with sour taste to avoid poisons. This is also an obvious evolution ability.

Our sweetness sensitivity level is the highest of the tastes. It amounts to one part in 200 of dissolved sucrose. Bitterness sensitivity on the other hand is 1 part in 2 million. This higher threshold for sweetness could cause us to eat too many carbohydrates, or so it's supposed to. The sensitivity to sweetness is a balance between being too strong and not strong enough. Obviously, this had to be the result of evolution. Our ancestors sought out sweet tasting food in order to get enough calories. In the modern world this causes a problem.

Bitter tasting foods don't do much for energy, so we tend to avoid bitter foods.

The proof that we humans like sweets is the following: The average American eats 156 pounds of sugar a year. That's about the body weight of a normal human. The question to ask is: Is sugar craving an addiction?

The answer is that we don't know for sure. However, sugar causes the release of dopamine in the brain, and it's released in the area of the brain associated with motivation and reward, the nucleus accumbens. It's the same area associated with heron addiction. I think that this problem is a product of modern human evolution. I doubt that our ancient ancestors used heroin or anything like it. Perhaps, some opioid type drugs were used in ancient times, but it's more of a modern problem, modern being the last thousand years.

Sugar ingestion also leads to release of endogenous opioids in the brain. This effect causes pleasure, the same sort of pleasure that heroin provides. So, the immediate conclusion is that sweets are addictive. I don't think I needed to tell you that. However, there is no clear scientific evidence that sugar is actually addictive.

The other myths about sugar are that it's an aphrodisiac and it causes hypersensitivity in children. Both of these myths have no scientific proof to back them up. The other myth that's bantered around in the media is that eating sugar caused diabetes. This is absolutely false. Diabetes is a genetic disease in which the body is unable to produce insulin (Type I) or the cells can't use the insulin effectively (Type II). Both of these are faults in genetics and are not the result of eating sugar; although, once one has diabetes, sugar consumption exacerbates the problem.

There is a campaign to abolish corn fructose in foods because it fools our bodies into thinking it's sugar and that it causes insulin resistance. There is no real scientific proof for this allegation. It's another band-wagon health falsehood that celebrities promote.

At least sweets are not illegal, but I recall that New York City had a ban on large soda drinks. This is the result of lawmakers ascribing to the false idea that obesity causes diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure.

Thanks for reading.