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• tigerexotique - Jul 05 2007 | nature, research, health

  Quoted: Somewhere in your brain, there's a cupcake circuit. how it works is not entirely clear, and you couldn't see it even if you knew where to look. But it's there all the same—and it's a powerful thing. You didn't pop out of the womb prewired for cupcakes, but long ago, early in your babyhood, you got your first taste of one, and instantly a series of sensory, metabolic and neurochemical fireworks went off. Human beings have always had a complicated relationship with food. Staying alive from day to day requires our bodies to keep a lot of systems running just so, but most of them—circulatory, respiratory, neurological, endocrine—operate automatically. Eating is different. Like sex, it's a voluntary thing. And like sex, it's a sine qua non to keep the species going. So nature cleverly rigs the game, making sure we pursue them both by making sure we can't resist them. In the case of food, that has lately spelled trouble. Human history has usually been characterized by too little to eat rather than too much. Nature never planned for what could happen when unchecked appetites were suddenly matched by unchecked resources. But we're seeing it now.