America has led the way in achieving something that was once believed to be science fiction: For the first time in history, poor people can afford to be fat. 

But because that is a new development, we have not quite learned how to cope with it. Social authoritarians want to ban things, of course, but that doesn't solve any problems. The issue is is that we don't yet know how to be responsible around convenient foods engineered for maximum tastiness. Advertising also means we are being bombarded with the temptation to eat. So people in contemporary societies often eat because tasty food is available, a much different thing than in primitive societies where people ate as much as they could because diets were boom and bust. A recent paper in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research predictably found that the tendency to eat when hungry is better than eating all of the time.

The individuals participating in the study were 45 undergraduate students (naturally) who were first asked to rate their level of hunger and then to consume a meal rich in carbohydrates. To measure how the meal was impacting participants' health, participants' blood glucose levels were measured at regular intervals after they consumed the meal. Blood glucose levels tend to rise after a meal containing carbohydrates and it is generally healthier if blood glucose levels rise by a relatively small amount because elevated blood glucose is damaging to the body's cells.

The results showed that individuals who were moderately hungry before the meal tended to have lower blood glucose levels after consuming the meal than individuals who were not particularly hungry before consuming the meal. These findings suggest that it might be healthier for individuals to eat when they are moderately hungry than when they are not hungry.