Originally Posted by Necromantis
Sweet tasting food indicate sugar. Sugar is benificial to the human body because it is made up of relatively short chains of glucose, the starting block of respiration, producing energy for movement and more importantly mitosis, again increasing the number of genes in a given area. An unfortunate by-product of sweet taste is that many sugars and additives leave harmful chemicals in the body actually restricting its function. But these foods taste good, and so we continue to eat them in large quantities in various different forms in an environment where it exists in unnatural plenty.
You eat oreos because they taste good. Surprise!
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And there's little-to-no motivation for genes to change the "yay!" response to sweet foods. The harmful effects of eating too much candy (assuming good dental hygiene, anyway) tend to be late in life, and manifest as heart disease or some other problem. However, anything post-reproduction is invisible to genes--all they know is that in their current incarnation, they survived long enough to reproduce.
That's actually a little too simple of a view, to be fair. Technically, genes directly respond to things that affect our ability to reproduce, and indirectly to our ability to raise our offspring to independence. That's why late-life genetic disorders like Alzheimer's, etc., don't get weeded out very efficiently--they generally set in not only after the mating age, but 18+ years after it. Many of them are there in the first place because they are the result of a gene mutation to combat some common ailment in a population. Sickle-cell anemia (okay, so not an example of a late-life disorder, but it's the first thing that popped into my head), for example, is thought to be an "intentional" mutation that effectively immunizes the carrier from malaria.
Wow, I've digressed a lot more than intended. Oops!