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The Pleasure Principle

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Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it. --Thomas Jefferson Sorry to disappoint, but this post has nothing to do with anything racy, unless you consider eating a racy topic. Harvey Rapp, in our interview last week, said something interesting about taste: that for him the first bite of a meal is always extremely enjoyable but then becomes less so with each subsequent bite. The pleasure principle at work. Enjoying our meals makes perfect evolutionary sense; if we suddenly hated eating (like we hate getting shots, even though they are usually good for us), we would avoid eating whenever possible, and our species would die out, for we would happily starve ourselves to death. It seems that naturally thin people have a near-perfect equilibrium with their hunger/satiety cues, and they think nothing about it. Lucky them. For the rest of us, something has gone haywire in the way we interact with food; for some of us, it may be genetic (e

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