There’s no doubt that enjoying life and having a healthy one go hand in hand. But when you walk with these two in the Shopping Mall of Life and reach the food court, which one takes the lead and which one follows?

There’s also no doubt that that question creates doubt. After all, enjoying life and having a healthy one are more than close, affectionate, mall-strolling associates.

They are as connected as Siamese twins.

What is unquestionable, however, is one of the things you need to do if you want these strolls to continue. For most Americans, though, it’s a something as difficult and complex as the operation required to separate Siamese twins conjoined at the head.

To severely limit the consumption of ultra-processed foods.

Before you dismiss this proposal as one only a food fascist like me would make, consider the words of someone who’s not, Lina Begdache, associate professor of health and wellness studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York. When asked by the web-based forum Newswise about a new Gallup poll that reveals both healthy eating and food enjoyment are on the decline in the U.S., Begdache cites the rising consumption of ultra-processed foods as a contributing factor — for not only the former, as would be expected, but also the latter.

Ironically enough, she explains, eating UPFs reduces food enjoyment because it triggers the brain’s reward system. “Prolonged stimulation of this system [however] can lead to tolerance, diminishing the enjoyment these foods provide over time.”

Getting less enjoyment from eating UPFs is something that Chris Van Tulleken comments about in his book Ultra-Processed People. The British doctor best known in the U.S. for eating a diet of 80 percent UPFs for 30 days, found consuming them to be “less enjoyable” shortly after his month-long experiment began — yet he still felt an especially strong desire to keep eating them despite that.

While he saw this as an addiction, the experts who viewed his before-and-after MRIs saw something else: that the “wiring” in his brain had not changed, meaning what he was experiencing was “physiological, not morphological” in nature and not addiction in the medical sense.

So how are you to make sense that eating UPFs begets the desire to eat more of them even though that leads to less eating enjoyment?

By gaining a greater sense of sensory adaptation.

In essence, sensory adaptation is the reduction in sensitivity from a constant exposure to a stimulus. It’s why a cigarette smoker will stink to someone who doesn’t smoke, yet he will not notice his own smell.

With that in mind, let’s say you’re really hungry in the middle of a workday afternoon because you skipped lunch in order to do your family’s weekly grocery shopping at Walmart. As you drive home to put the perishables away, you decide to eat as many apples as needed to end your hunger.

That first bite tastes so good and so sweet you’re convinced you’ll eat a half dozen, but the second apple doesn’t taste quite as delicious as the first. Yet even though the amount of calories you’ve ingested so far falls well short of the amount of your typical lunch, it’s unlikely you’ll have a third.

The fruit’s high water content (84 percent), the 8 grams of fiber contained in two of them, and sensory adaptation usually combine to keep that from happening.

Now let’s alter the scenario a bit. You still skipped lunch to grocery shop at Walmart, and you still are starving, but now you’re back at you desk. By your side is a box of banana-nut muffins you bought from Walmart’s bakery because tomorrow morning is your morning to provide the coffee-break snack.

You normally don’t eat mass-produced muffins, but you are cheap and they were too — and you are amazed at how good the first one tastes. The second one you eat, though, is not as enjoyable, and not nearly as hunger-busting as that second apple.

Upon reading the label, you learn two muffins are more than triple the amount of calories you’d get in two apples. In fact, they are as calorically dense (720 calories) as your typical lunch — but far higher in fat (38 grams) and added sugars (44 grams).

What’s just as bad is that 90 minutes later you’d swear you never ate one muffin let alone two. Yet just as Van Tulleken mentions in his book — and a direct result of consuming ultra-processed food — you feel a strong desire to eat a third despite being disappointed with the taste of the second.

Ten minutes later you succumb to that desire. And 90 minutes after that you’re feeling hungry again and looking forward to supper.

Now whether or not something like this ever happens to you, I cannot say, but it often does occur.

And is among the reasons why more than 70 percent of adult Americans are currently overweight.