Dana Small’s assertion switched me into game-playing mode.

I was reading an article about why it’s so easy to eat an excess of processed foods, and Small, PhD, professor of psychiatry and psychology and the director of the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, contributed this: “In nature, foods high in fat and carbohydrate are very rare.”

So the reading stopped and the game to name the rarities started. What comes next is a summary of the logic I used.

Eat any type of fish you catch and you’ll will ingest a fair amount of fats, but not a calorie of carbohydrate. The same is true for animals you hunt.

That eliminated any type of game from being one of the answers.

All nuts except chestnuts are high in fat, but the amount of carbs they contain is minimal, usually 10 to 15 percent of the total calories. Vegetables are high in carbs, but the fats found in them are negligible, rarely more than 10 percent of the total calories. Fruits are basically water and sugar as well as some fiber, so they are especially high in carbohydrates and never more than 10 percent fat ... except for ...

Except for — I think I got one! — avocados.

I consulted the 17th edition of Bowes & Church’s Food Values of Portions Commonly Used to confirm that avocados are 77 percent fat and 20 percent carbohydrate and decided that avocados had to be one of Small’s rarities.

Using my antiquated old-school research skills, I played on. I paged through the aforementioned book to find specific foods, wrote down grams of fat, grams of carbs, and total calories in them, and used a handheld calculator to multiply and divide and determine if the food was a rarity or not.

Then the Rip Van Winkle in me rubbed my old-school eyes and realized it’s 2018. I got on the internet and got those percentages in a quarter of the time.

That’s how I verified that some lesser-known cheeses were virtually devoid of carbohydrates (just like better-known ones) when that old-school brain of mine produced an elementary-school thought — and three more answers.

Before you can make any type of cheese you need some sort of milk.

I googled goat’s milk and got that it is 54 percent fat and 26 percent carbohydrate, searched for soy milk and found it is 52 percent fat and 21 percent carbohydrate, and then I hit the jackpot. Although we tend to think of all forms of cow’s milk as being high in protein, at only 21 percent protein, whole milk really isn’t.

But it is 49 percent fat and 30 percent carbohydrate and, as far as I can tell, the rarest of Small’s rarities.

If you can find a natural food where the percentages are closer, email me and don’t hesitate to boast a bit. But even if you can top my answer, that won’t make the big problem with processed foods any smaller.

As man evolved, he ate natural foods and learned to eat in a way that helped his health. But in the last 60 years, we’ve consumed more and more foods that, unlike natural foods, are high in both fat and carbs.

Processed foods.

This change helps explain why the inhabitants of first-world nations have gotten heavier in the last 55 years or so, and the inhabitants in many second- and third-world nations have done so in the last 15 to 20.

In an article published in 2011 by The Lancet, B. A. Swinburn and colleagues suggest that first-world nations hit the “energy balance flipping point” sometime after 1960. Until then, as physical labor decreased in these affluent countries, so did caloric intake.

But sometime in the 60s, the second decrease stopped taking place — though the first did not. This, they argue, occurred almost entirely because of the development of very tasty processed foods high in both fat and carbs that negate the dietary instincts developed by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

If the conclusion that Swinburn and his colleagues reached is correct — that hitting the “energy balance flipping point” in the 60s triggered the obesity epidemic that still exists today — then so is the idea behind this column’s title.

When food developers create processed foods, they keep one thing utmost in mind: Will the product sell? To ensure that, they need to make the product appealing.

Fats and sugars appeal to most people, which led to both being used liberally initially by food processors — and an eventual, all-important discovery: Combining fats and sugars together in liberal amounts makes an “A” word besides “appealing” an even more appropriate modifier for the new food creation.

Addicting.

Just a little something to think about the next time you create your grocery store list.