Why You Can’t Stop Choosing the Burger: Nervous System Science Explained
Why does everything turn to cupcakes? Inspired by Dr Ben House (https://broresearch.com/meet-dr-house/).
Part 1 in a series.
Why does everything turn into cupcakes?
You know you should choose the salad. You choose the burger. Again.
When completing a nutrition course by Dr Ben House a few years ago he presented the idea regarding diets that they all eventually turn into cupcakes. I’ll summarise a little for you, he puts forward that through all of human history the evolutionary goal was to get as many calories as possible for as little energy as possible. Therefore, when you think about the food choices we make, making “unhealthy” choices is often the “right” thing to do from an evolutionary perspective. Our modern food environment is rare historically speaking to have so many high calorie options available so easily. We did not evolve to easily understand the exchanging of magic internet money for magic hyper processed food that hits every craving button we have.
He discusses how every popular diet eventually makes a hyper processed “cupcake” version of its food. Gluten free cupcakes, keto cupcakes, paleo cupcakes, vegan cupcakes and so forth. Therefore we might better understand peoples food choices if we understand that despite it not being intellectually a good choice to eat “peppers over pizzas” that from an evolutionary perspective the person is likely doing the correct survival behaviours.
Your biology is working perfectly for the wrong world. And so you might wonder, what does this have to do with breathing. I want to make the case in this two part series that your breathing enables you to better engage your higher brains resources rather than automatic choices.
The perspective Dr House provides on evolution and how in our modern environment it works counter to us in certain situations, such as making good choices in a supermarket, provides I believe a fresh lens with which to consider and respond to our own behaviour. You are making the correct evolutionary choices, but you are in an environment not adapted to these choices. From an evolutionary perspective uber eats makes sense and is the right choice. However, humans have also evolved the ability to engage in long term planning and consider others via many changes including brain structure, culture, and moral reasoning. I add to this argument that when our nervous system is more regulated, something we can access via breathing, we can better override our biology regarding short term thinking and make choices aligned with our long term thinking and higher order reasoning functions. We will also be better able to navigate complexity, and be creative, playful, happy.
“Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.” - Robert Wright.
“In historical terms as a species:
we’ve never been so painfully aware of how we look, or how our bodies work.
we’ve never had so much food, and so much tasty food.
We’ve never had such high expectations for ourselves
We’ve never been so out of sync with our biology
We’ve never felt so alone.” - Krista Scott Dixon.
The Nervous System Connection
Your nervous system is how you get information about the world and process it. It uses sensory receptors (eyes, ears, skin, etc.) that detect stimulus such as light, sound and touch, and convert them into electrical signals. It sends these signals through the spinal cord to the brain, the brain processes this information to create perception, thoughts, and actions while motor neurons carry back instructions for responses such as moving muscles.
There are multiple components to the nervous system. You have the central nervous system (brain and spine), and the peripheral nervous system made up of nerves, the somatic nervous system (voluntary movements) and the autonomic nervous system (involuntary actions).
Our informational environment is chronically stressful. These days for many of us the body is constantly receiving information about the world around us that states we’re in danger, we’re powerless to stop it and we never get the all clear. Ongoing news and world events that are beyond our locus of control yet follow us around on addictive screens 24/7. Work and financial worries where we no longer “clock off” at 5pm to give our body a chance to wind down. We fail in modern life to get the safety cues we need, such as meaningful connection with our communities that give our bodies the “all safe” signal. Despite the fact that we have a lot of our base needs met much of the time in the modern world, we receive constant signals of scarcity, danger, threat, uncertainty and social threat.
Our body takes this information and processes it allowing our bodies to respond. Our body is trying to do the right thing and keep us safe. In doing so, it gears our nervous system up to respond to a threat activating fight or flight pathways. This also includes activation of our stress hormone system and inflammatory states via our immune system. However, with threats that are ever present and without any all clear signals this can lead to the nervous system becoming imbalanced and trapped in stressful states.
Your body doesn’t only receive information from the outside world however, it also receives information from the internal world (i.e. inside your body) via interoception. Here is where breathing can step in to help us modulate external stressors. By soothing the bodies state via breathing practices we are giving the body an “all clear” and safety signal. Breathing is one of the few ways you can influence the autonomic nervous system.
Breathing activates receptors within your lungs which send signals throughout the body including to the vagus nerve via the brainstem. This lets your brain get feedback saying “breathing is calm and controlled” which is incompatible with actual danger. If your breathing is relaxed it is giving feedback that there is not actual danger present. These “safety” signals can override external stressor signals shifting the body back to a parasympathetic (relaxed) state resulting in lower cortisol, reduced inflammation, prefrontal cortex back online.
Chronic stress degenerates prefrontal cortex structure and function. The prefrontal cortex is the front part of the brain’s frontal lobe, acting as the “command center” for high-level cognitive functions like decision-making, personality expression, planning, self-control, and social behavior, integrating past experiences with present input to guide complex, goal-directed actions. When the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) is highly activated the brain will suppress prefrontal cortex function and prioritise: Immediate survival over future planning, binary categorisation over nuance, calorie dense food, in group cohesion over out group co-operation, speed over accuracy. Sympathetic activation redirects metabolic resources to immediate threat-response systems. Complex reasoning, ambiguity tolerance, long-term planning, and moral deliberation are metabolically expensive and time-consuming which can be incompatible with acute survival needs in a crisis.
This is your evolutionary inheritance working perfectly for the wrong context. You won’t be able to be cognitively flexible nor creative. Your ability to access higher order thought and actions will be less within reach.
Whereas, if the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) is more active this is going to support increases in prefrontal cortex activity and decrease of stress markers. Prefrontal structures actively suppress stress responses. When parasympathetic tone (vagal tone) is high (something that can be trained by breathing exercises) the prefrontal cortex stress relationship functions better helping to inhibit threat responses. With this sense of safety the brain is able to better access: long term planning over immediate gratification > the future becomes real and motivating, nuanced thinking over binary categorisation “it’s complicated” is tolerable, nutritional quality over density, accuracy over speed. Parasympathetic states maintain metabolic resources in the prefrontal cortex. This enables complex reasoning, ambiguity tolerance, creative problem-solving, and moral deliberation - capacities that require safety to function. This is the state required for growth, learning, and navigating complexity.
Why breathing specifically? Unlike meditation (which requires the prefrontal cortex that stress may be disabling) or therapy (which addresses thoughts, not physiology), breathing works at the foundational level changing your body’s signals about safety. Many people, myself included, have been surprised how differently they’re able to conceptualise and consider a challenge when they become aware of what nervous system state they’re in and become able to shift it.
In 1921 a scientist called Otto Loewi demonstrated that electrically stimulating the vagus nerve from a frog heart caused it to release a chemical substance that was later identified as acetylcholine. The story goes that he received this information from a dream, scribbled it down but could not read his writing the next morning. When the dream returned the following night, he went straight to the lab at 3am. This fluid, acetylcholine, when transferred to a second heart slowed the heart down. This discovery revealed a profound insight, the vagus nerve functions like a programmable control system. When activated it releases acetylcholine which slowed heart rate, reduced inflammation, and provided calming effects. This is where breathing comes in, you can trigger this response with slow diaphragmatic breathing. When you breathe slowly through your nose, stretch receptors in your lungs activate vagal pathways, triggering acetylcholine release to your heart, digestive system, and throughout your body. You’re essentially using the same programmable system Loewi discovered, instead of electrodes, you’re using the breath you already have.
This means breathing isn’t just ‘calming’. It is literally reprogramming your nervous system to interpret your environment differently. The same stressors exist, but your body is able to better interpret then and respond.
In Part 2, we’ll explore more including from cultural angles.
