Sneakey Eating

An evolutionary perspective on overeating syndromes.

Most animals have a simple problem in life- find enough food to live and survive. But social animals, if they are even slightly advanced, share food, and thus alter this basic equation. They have to find ways to store and share food in a way that sustains the group, whether that is starving the old, or feeding the helpless larvae that can not feed themselves. Humans have always faced this dilemma, but don't have the rigid programming that insects do.

Humans can lie, and steal, and then lie some more. It isn't pretty, but sometimes it gets the job done. Humans can regard rules as optional, a flexibility that is a perpetual threat to institutions, norms, cultural patterns, and ultimately to group success. We recently went through an administration that regarded norms as suggestions, laws as annoyances, and then wondered why their behavior attracted so much hatred, and such low historical esteem.

This dynamic comes to mind more concretely in the case of overeating syndromes, which exemplify the conflict between the individual and the group. In a prehistoric setting, food was almost always scarce and precious. In all native cultures there are elaborate practices of public food sharing and eating, which contribute to surveillance by the community of what everyone is eating. Anyone who violates such social structures must have been severely penalized.

Public, communal eating is a fundamental human practice.

Imagine then that someone feels a compulsion to eat more than their share. Such a compulsion would be highly advantageous- if successful- to enable survival when the others in the group might be starving or malnourished. Some extra weight might well mean the difference of making it through the next winter or not. But being caught could dramatically alter the calculus. Primitive societies had harsh punishments for violating critical norms, including ostracism or execution. What then? 

I would suggest that this background sets the stage for overeating syndromes that commonly combine secret eating, often at night, stealth, and stealing. In a world of plenty like today, it is stigmatized and medicalized, and due to the abundance of food, relatively easy to navigate and thus easy to gain weight from. But pre-historically, it would have been far more fraught, and challenging, probably less likely to result in easily observable weight gains. Like other issues in social life, this conflict would take the form of an arms race between cheaters and rule-enforcers. It would be a cognitive battle between effective surveillance and punishment, vs stealth and the intelligence required to not get caught. So one can view it as one impetus among many other evolutionary forces that shaped human intelligence, and in light of its considerable incidence in modern populations, an arms race that was never resolved. Indeed, it is the type of trait that comes under balancing selection, where a high incidence in a population would be self-defeating, while a low incidence yields a much more successful outcome.

• Satire- not so funny when you are the target.
• Making every home a part of the energy solution.
• Constitution? Who ever heard of enforcing it?