It’s time to admit it – Australia is becoming an obese nation.
This series looks at how this has happened and, more importantly, what
we can do to stop the obesity epidemic.
Today we look at how we got here, with Russell Keast explaining how, by creating food to suit our appetite, we have found the recipe for nutritional disaster, while Garry Egger looks at economic growth and why we should use the economic slowdown to try to shrink our waistlines.
For all but the past 10,000 years, the hominin species (two-legged primates) on the human evolutionary tract have been hunter-gatherers. And over millions of years of natural selection, our senses developed and were refined to help us navigate the local environment.
Of critical importance to our survival was the ability to make correct food choices and our sense of taste informed the hunter-gatherer about the suitability of food for consumption.
When a potential food was placed in the mouth, the five-taste primaries informed the brain about essential nutrients and toxins:
Today we look at how we got here, with Russell Keast explaining how, by creating food to suit our appetite, we have found the recipe for nutritional disaster, while Garry Egger looks at economic growth and why we should use the economic slowdown to try to shrink our waistlines.
For all but the past 10,000 years, the hominin species (two-legged primates) on the human evolutionary tract have been hunter-gatherers. And over millions of years of natural selection, our senses developed and were refined to help us navigate the local environment.
Of critical importance to our survival was the ability to make correct food choices and our sense of taste informed the hunter-gatherer about the suitability of food for consumption.
When a potential food was placed in the mouth, the five-taste primaries informed the brain about essential nutrients and toxins:
- sweet elicited by sugars reflecting carbohydrate,
- umami elicited by glutamic and other amino acids reflecting protein content,
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