Your gut feelings want you to slam down McDonalds cheeseburgers one after another, day after day. Some degree of self-control is probably warranted.
Are we talking about the same thing here? When the article is talking about gut feelings it is referring to intuition.
Your intuition is probably telling you eating McDonalds cheeseburgers day after day is a mistake even while the scales are telling you it is fine.
Imho, I think a lot of people assume cheap food will make you sick because it's cheap and americans tend to moralize pricing. A balanced diet is obviously better for you, but the human body is extremely resilient to nutritional imbalances in the short term.
What tends to drive unhealthy trends linked to fast food (or other highly sugary or fatty foods) is just price point and ease of consumption. It's a lot easier to buy burgers than it is to figure out how to fit making rice and beans efficiently and tastily into your already busy lifestyle. Buying calorie-dense food that's easy to consume will always be attractive.
My gut says “I will feel bad”, my mouth screams “tastebuds demand an experience!”
Make no mistake, the term self-control doesn't just apply to food instincts, it applies to people instincts too. Your instincts want you to go around assuming that ugly people are bad and pretty people are good, but if you avoid every uggo you're gonna miss out (especially in tech) and if you trust every handsome salesman you meet you're gonna get rolled. Thoughtfulness and self-control are always warranted.
But I often find that the “gut” feeling is more often right, and the unexplainability of it comes from the fact that it takes hundreds of little things into account and models future interaction outcomes and presents the feeling you will have in the end as ”gut feeling”. Your own black box of neural networks in your gut.