Addictive Sweets

In his 2015 book Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari paints a portrait of how a prehistoric person might have behaved when coming across an unexpected gift:

If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes. Today we may be living in high-rise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. That’s what makes some of us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down a jumbo Coke

That DNA causes sweets to increase levels of serotonin, a calming neurotransmitter, and dopamine, which heightens pleasure. The result, as in the case of the Stone Age woman, is that sweets such as chocolate keep us wanting more. It’s hard-wired into our genes.

This force is so strong that people often can’t stop, even though they may be ashamed at how much they’re eating. Growing up I saw my mom regularly hiding her eating habits from my father. She would wait until he went to bed, then she’d take out her package of raw cookie dough, or her bag of peanut butter M&Ms and share them with my sister and I while we watched a scary movie.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this instilled in me that I should eat sweets in secret because it was a shameful thing. It also taught me at a young age to feel ashamed of my body, since her whole motivation for the deception was because she believed she was fat. I still fight this insecurity to this day, as does my sister. What, how, and when we eat has a lot of power over how we feel as a person. This is especially the case for women.

Sweets aren’t healthy, of course. In moderation however, they can be a really delightful treat that can even become an institution in a family. In my family I’ve tweaked a Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookie recipe over the years into something that we get really excited about, and I’d like to share it with you.

Side note: Please do not eat these cookies in secret. Instead, share them with your loved ones and eat them with those you enjoy spending time with!