> If that gets in the way of nutrition, taste wins every time.
It's actually worse than that. A major current research thread is on the low-level mechanisms of "food reward" and the interaction of the brain and obesity. For example, Stephan Guyenet at the University of Washinton researches this area[1]. Even if nutrition is fine, hyper-palatable foods[2] can have a negative impact on health for a variety of reasons. In good part, they basically make it impossible to avoid overconsumption, but there are other implications being studied. Check out Guyenet's blog and twitter feed for references on this developing area. (N.B.: The work that Guyenet does and references isn't always the most accessible or easily interpretable in some cases. He's emphatically not a top source if you're just looking to learn a high level approach towards improving your diet.)
[1] example blog post: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2013/02/food-reward-fr...
[2] The idea of "hyper-palatability" refers to engineered button-pressing of the human brain by modern processed foods and food ingredients. It doesn't mean "food that tastes good", of which there's a world's variety that this moniker doesn't apply to.
