The sweet taste was adaptive in other ways as well. This adaptation was a survival mechanism: Eat fructose and decrease the likelihood you will starve to death.
“During that time,” he said, “a mutation occurred” that increased the apelike creatures’ sensitivity to fructose so that even small amounts were stored as fat.
In a forthcoming paper, Johnson postulates that our earliest ancestors went through a period of significant starvation 15 million years ago in a time of global cooling. Importantly, fructose appears to activate processes in your body that make you want to hold on to fat, explains Richard Johnson, a professor in the department of medicine at the University of Colorado and author of “ The Sugar Fix.” At a time when food was scarce and meals inconsistent - hunting is significantly less reliable than a drive-through - hanging on to fat was an advantage, not a health risk. When we eat table sugar, our bodies break this down into glucose and fructose. “Sugar is a deep, deep ancient craving,” said Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University and author of “ The Story the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease.”Īnd sugar offers more than just energy - it helps us store fat, too. These animals evolved to like riper fruit because it had a higher sugar content than unripe fruit and therefore supplied more energy. Millions and millions of years ago, apes survived on sugar-rich fruit. We can blame our sweet tooth on our primate ancestors.