I’m currently sitting in a trendy pub in a small village on the outskirts of Cambridge. It’s a Thursday night in early December, so it’s dark and freezing outside. But here there is a warm and cozy fireplace, and the whole place is decorated with festive decorations. Michael Bublé is singing Christmas songs on the radio and I’m holding a big glass of Malbec. life is wonderful.

It’s been a long day (actually a long week) and let me prove to you that this is definitely the place to be. This is one of his “gastropubs” that serves lovely food and where I enjoyed a weekday date night with his wife Jane.

For dinner we both had salted trout to start, then as main courses Jane had hake and I had burger and chips. The portion sizes were healthy and we were both pretty full by the time we finished eating.

Then you know what happened next. The waiter comes over with the dessert menu and asks, “Are you tempted?” Yes, it’s definitely possible. And even though we were full, even on a weeknight, we both ordered dessert. I had sticky toffee pudding with ice cream and my wife had a slice of tarte au citron with crème fraîche. Like clockwork, the dessert stomach hits again.

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Now the question arises, why is it so specific to dessert? Would I have been better off having another burger? Would Jane have eaten more hake? Absolutely not. So what’s so special about the dessert?

To answer this question, we need to look to evolution. Flashback to the Serengeti River 50,000 years ago and your ancestors dragging an antelope into their village. Let’s just say, metabolically speaking, they spent 2,000 calories stalking, chasing, and defeating them.

It is clear that once they return to their village, they will have to burn at least 2,000 calories to recoup their expenses. Otherwise, it’s not sustainable. However, there is no guarantee that you will successfully catch an antelope next time. This means that if they only They don’t live very long if they eat to meet their metabolic needs.

At that time, the pleasurable part of the brain is activated. This dominates the sense of reward we all receive from eating, leading us to eat more than we actually need. But how do you overcome the mechanical challenge of having 2,000 calories of food stuck in your stomach?

Well, our brains can be very picky. They begin to crave more calorie-dense foods, meaning they contain more calories per gram. This allows you to fill every inch of your stomach.

So what are the foods with the most calories? Those high in free sugars and fats. So, what foods are high in sugar and fat? dessert.

In other words, your dessert tripe is actually an evolutionary holdover from your days in the Serengeti. It’s there to make sure you’re craving the right types of food even when you’re full so you can maximize your calorie intake at every meal. After all, there was no guarantee at all when the next meal would arrive.

You’ve probably noticed an obvious problem here. While this movement has kept us living in a periodic cycle of feast and famine, many people today live in cycles of feast and then more feast. I definitely wasn’t need That sticky toffee pudding (which I really enjoyed and didn’t regret for a minute!).

By the way, the “dessert belly” is not just a strange human phenomenon. Now, I completely understand that I’m not going to top my lunch of crème brûlée and a glass of chilled muscat with a freshly killed antelope by a lion. But consider a grizzly bear during a salmon run upstream in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

Grizzlies arrive at the salmon run swimming buffet in the fall, with the aim of storing as much fat as possible for the upcoming hibernation.

The bear first eats the fish almost whole, down to the bones. However, as they become fuller and filler and store more and more fat, they will only eat the skin of the salmon and the thin layer of fat underneath. why? Because this is the most caloric part of the fish. They begin to change what they eat to maximize their energy reserves.

So, while desserts are clearly a human cultural construct, the phenomenon of maximizing the caloric density of foods that we crave when we are full has been conserved through evolution. That means it’s not your fault for finding room for dessert even after a satisfying meal.

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