Old Minds, New Marketplaces: How Evolved Psychological Mechanisms Trigger Mismatched Food Preferences

Principally a result of unhealthy food choices, almost half of adults worldwide are overweight or obese. Current food retail practices bear some responsibility for such public health issues. We argue that numerous attempts to promote healthy eating have been unsuccessful for failing to account for our outdated evolved food selection mechanisms. Building on the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis and contrasting ancestral versus present-day foraging environments, we discuss how marketing activities exploit evolutionarily outdated food preferences and elicit unhealthy food choices for profit maximization at the expense of public health in terms of food consumption. We conclude by explaining how to mitigate this harmful trend by applying the law of law’s leverage to facilitate effective strategies to increase healthy food choices. Notably, we show how evolutionary psychology principles can be used to reconcile competing interests of consumers, retailers, and decision-makers responsible for public health policies.