Mastodawn

You ever think about how wild it is that modern humans have existed for like 300k+ years, and for approximately all of that time precisely zero of them had any idea how chemistry actually worked, but meanwhile your body is made of literally trillions of cells that somehow understand and remember everything you eat, so they're able to translate a weird very specific micronutrient deficiency into a food craving without you consciously being any the wiser?

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Fabian Giesen Feb 4

E.g. a story my mom often tells is that when she was pregnant, she suddenly had a craving for pickled herring, despite ordinarily not liking fish.

On the surface this is just a random anecdote but the implications about how your body works are kinda staggering

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NRoach44 Feb 4

@rygorous along similar lines I used to take some vitamin C supplements, and I swear they'd taste better sometimes (despite they were just artificial sweetener and orange flavour).

I can only imagine it's partially because I needed it more when it tasted better.

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Chris Siebenmann

@nroach44 @rygorous There are a ton of anecdotes about various sports drinks to the effect of "this tasted like crap until one day I was out going really hard and then ...". And I'm a recreational cyclist and on hot days one of my warning markers is "mm this salt tastes really good".

(Not all sports drinks, especially these days; I think many are now loaded with extra sugar to be appealing to non-athletes, who are a much bigger market.)