this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

44821 readers
826 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 19 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 2 points 1 week ago

The same reason people will logically understand that crack is bad for them but crave it like crack

[–] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

You crave salt and fat because your body needs a little bit of these things to survive, but finding salt and fat out in nature is really really hard, so those cavemen that liked the taste of salty or fatty foods enough to make the extra effort to find those foods were more likely to survive to be your ancestors and you inherited that behaviour. That's why you like McDonald's, it's full of the salt and fat that is hard to obtain if your diet consists of mostly roots and mushrooms and leaves.

McDonalds is bad for you because it's unnaturally full of salt and fat. Far, far more than your body needs and far more than your cavemen ancestors would have eaten naturally. Especially if you eat McDonald's often. Too much of anything turns that thing into a poison.

McDonald's has only been around a generation or two. That's not enough time for the people who crave McDonalds and eat too much of it to die off, leaving mostly people who don't crave McDonalds to remain.

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Because your diet sucks. A few months of eating only unprocessed food and you'd probably eat McDonald's exactly one more time in your life

And I do specifically mean McDonald's... It's uniquely disgusting, even among fast food. It tastes like it's reconstituted food scraps doped with sugar

[–] starlinguk@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It's amazing how you can eat 12 chicken nuggets with large fries and still feel like you haven't eaten anything.

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 1 points 3 days ago

Oh, I'd feel nauseous lol, those nuggets are so gross and I don't really like the fries

[–] toynbee@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When I was a kid, I heard two unsubstantiated rumors about McDonald's food:

  1. It used kangaroo meat (not sure why this was a claim)
  2. It mixed in nicotine (to make the food more addictive)

I doubt that either are true, but if the latter were maybe it would answer your question.

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

They don't mix in nicotine, no need for all of that when MSG exists. They do mix in MSG to the meats and cheeses. Pretty much all fast food does, because it makes it addictive, and tasty.

[–] toynbee@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

When I was a kid, I don't think I knew what MSG was, so this reasoning would have been lost on me.

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

When I was a kid the racist "MSG in Chinese food" panic was happening. I knew about Chinese salt when I started cooking around 6 or 7

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Having a reaction to a food additive is not racist. You are parroting the bots spread forth by a $7B industry. MSG reaction is real. Do we call people who get food allergies racist?

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Yet, everyone I know that had so called reactions to MSG in Chinese food could eat Pizza Hut and McDonald's which both use MSG and they never had a 'reaction.'

They also haven't complained about MSG since the late '80s. There may be some people that have an actual allergy to MSG, but I have yet to meet one, and I have a much higher sampling of people to pull from than most.

[–] Manjushri@piefed.social 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

There is a chemical in your brain called dopamine which is an important part of how we feel pleasure. Use of recreational drugs and alcohol causes a rush of this chemical and that is part of the pleasure we feel from using them. The problem is that regular use of such chemicals causes us to have lower levels of dopamine when we are not using them. We end up feeling a desire for the drug or booze to get our dopamine levels back up.

Diets high in sugar, salt, and carbs also causes a dopamine rush. When you eat that food regularly, it lowers your normal dopamine levels, just like drugs and alcohol do, if not to the same level. That is why you feel that craving. Eating such food occasionally is fine, but if you do it to often, you can literally get an addiction to it.

Edit to add -

You mentioned that fast foods are low quality and bad for you. That is true, but but only in high quantities. Fats and sugars were high value foods to our ancient ancestors. Fats are very high source of energy. You get more than twice the energy from a gram of fat than you get from a gram of carbohydrates or protein. Sugars are easily digested making them a source of quick energy compared to other carbs, fats, or proteins. Eating these kinds of foods gave us a survival advantage over those who didn't, at least until we learned the agricultural skills to make them easy to acquire. Now, many or most people can get such foods any time they want and though they no longer give us an advantage, and eating a lot of them is actually harmful in the long run, those ancient taste preferences still remain in our evolved programing.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 days ago

Overactivate dopamine receptors and the receptors shut down, like all receptors. Lack of dopamine signalling is Parkinson's disease.

[–] Venator@lemmy.nz 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Therefore, the cure for fast food addiction is recreational drugs and alcohol!

[–] Manjushri@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

RFK, is that you?

[–] leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I don't get it.

I've tried McDonalds food.

It's more expensive than much better alternatives, it doesn't look good, and it tastes worse, like the cheapest ultraprocessed crap you can find in the kind of budget supermarket that only carries foreign brands you've never heard of.

I can find better and cheaper food in seedy bars I'd never willingly go to, or by buying the cheapest brands (even the good brands or fast food joints, or buying natural ingredients, wouldn't be significantly more expensive) and cooking at home.

It really boggles my mind. Is it like smoking? Do people start eating it due to peer pressure and never stop because they get addicted?

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 days ago

Advertising and peer pressure as teens.

You could feed a family of 4 for a week on the cost. It has no nutritive value in addition to no flavor. It's like some type of dystopian government food paste.

[–] Devial@discuss.online -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Because fat and sugar are drugs. People don't usually think of them like drugs, because of the widely accepted, but very wrong, attitude that only illegal substances can be drugs. Sugar, fat, caffeine, alcohol or tobacco are all drugs. They all trigger a desirable chemical reaction in your brain, and all have addictive potential. At least 2 or 3 of them are also significantly more harmful to you than several types of actually illegal drugs.

And in general, though perhaps most strongly for drugs, many people suffer from the cognitive bias of "illegal=bad & legal=good. Automatically and by default"

[–] Aspharr@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I get the spirit of what you're saying, they're all habit forming, but fat and sugar (IE: carbohydrates) are macronutrients our bodies need to survive. Obviously they're not needed in the quantities that are available to us in modern society, but our biological desire to seek out high calorie foods is a survival mechanism rather than what happens with other habit forming substances like tobacco.

I don't mean to nitpick here but I feel like that distinction is important because saying "sugar and fat bad" without a little nuance can miss lead folks that aren't properly educated on nutrition, which in my experience is a large portion of my fellow Americans.

Edit: just wanted to add here that there's another comment by someone else who more or less states the same thing, but makes that distinction and I have no problem with it.