Tamzyn Campbell
Sugar is addictive. Are you serious? The concept of sugar addiction is relatively new, but more and more studies are showing that it is indeed very real. Sugar alters our brain’s biochemical pathways, and studies have likened it to being as addictive as cocaine.
Whether we realise it or not, many of us use sugar and carbs to alter our brain chemistry, to experience a rush of dopamine that stimulates our reward centres and makes us feel good. Dr Nicole Avena, neuroscientist from the University of Florida’s College of Medicine, and author on food and sugar addiction, reviewed animal studies and found that sugar fulfils all four criteria necessary to classify it as addictive:
Bingeing: Sugar-addicted rats who have their sugar supply restricted intermittently will binge on sugar as soon as they’re offered enough. The bingeing spikes the dopamine levels in their brains, and the associated pleasurable sensation makes them binge even more.
Withdrawal: When the rats’ sugar is taken away, they show signs of withdrawal – teeth chattering, tremors, shakes and anxiety.
Craving: After two weeks of enforced sugar abstinence, sugaraddicted rats display seeking and craving behaviour. The rats also develop tolerance – their sugar overconsumption increases over time because they need more sugar to maintain the “high” that they crave.
Cross-sensitisation: Sugar-addicted rats readily switch from sugar to other drugs such as alcohol or amphetamines (a type of stimulant medication). In other words, sugar and sweet rewards are not only able to act as a substitute for addictive drugs, such as cocaine, but can even be more rewarding and attractive.
Sugar hijacks your brain – the biology of addiction
Bingeing on tasty, sugar-laden food boosts levels of the addictive, pleasure and reward neurotransmitter dopamine. It is this dopamine boost that’s largely responsible for giving sugar its addictive potential. We basically overstimulate our rewarding and mood-altering pathway and the pleasurable feelings it elicits. Sugar “hijacks” the brain’s reward system and because of this we keep looking for ways to increase the levels of dopamine in our brains. Over time, we need more and more sugar to obtain the same level of dopamine release. Dopamine is released not only once we have consumed sugar, but even at the expectation of consuming it.
This explains why even the sight of a cupcake or the smell of freshly baked bread can render us powerless. Did the dopamine make you do it?
What happens to your brain while you consume sugar?
Recent studies have shown that in certain individuals, the consumption of sugar lights up the same centres in the brain in PET scans as cocaine does in cocaine addicts. When sugar addicts consume sugar and carbs (the latter because they digest as sugar in the body), the dopamine released in the brain produces a “high” similar to the high experienced by a drug user.
For some people, merely seeing pictures or thinking of high-sugar foods such as a milkshake can trigger these brain effects. The high (a neurochemical addiction) can provide the individual with further motivation to eat sugar. Once the effect of the sugar and carbs wears off, the cravings start, which creates an addiction cycle. With the continued consumption of sugar and starchy foods (specifically junk food, processed and artificial foods) our bodies become adaptable to the amount of sugar consumed and our tolerance or threshold increases.
This means more of these foods are required to create the same effect (the same is experienced by drug addicts and alcoholics). All we’re doing is continually stimulating our neurochemical reward centres in the brain. Ordinary biological signals that control hunger become overwhelmed through this stimulation, and our bodies (and brains) no longer understand hungry or not-hungry signals.
Studies show that so-called addictive personalities – those people who are predisposed to becoming addicted – have a genetic variation that causes their reward pathway to malfunction. Addictive personalities remain unfulfilled in response to fulfilling an instinctual drive (hunger, thirst or sex).
If you are a sugar, carb or food addict, you may not experience an “off switch” in response to eating, which tells you that you have satisfied your hunger. This explains why eating until you’re satisfied may not work for addictive personalities, even on a low-carb, high-fat diet, and why portion control is necessary.
The psychology of addiction: What does it mean to be an addict?
Addiction is a disorder, a disease. It’s the dependence on a substance such as heroin, alcohol or sugar, or a behaviour such as binge-eating, gaming or gambling, which is detrimental to the person using the substance or engaging in the behaviour. At first, the substance use or behaviour can be incredibly rewarding. But with continued use (of a substance or a behaviour) the person may become powerless over it.
Once an addiction turns into a compulsive pursuit of a reward despite it having a negative impact on work, relationships or health, or when a person can’t voluntarily disengage from this activity, then an individual is said to be in active addiction.
Addiction is chronic and progressive. This means the condition never goes away, and the symptoms get worse over time if not treated. Recovery from addiction is possible, but requires both abstinence from the addictive substance and/or behaviour, and daily maintenance by the addict. In addition to sugar and carbs being chemically addictive, they have strong emotional and behavioural addictive properties too.
We believe sugar addiction involves a compulsive pursuit of foods rich in sugar and carbohydrates in response to feelings, both positive and negative. Do these sound familiar? “I’m stressed; a can of cooldrink will calm me down.”; “I’m feeling unhappy and in need of comfort; if I just eat that doughnut, I’ll feel better.” Or “I’m lonely; that extra slice of bread will help me to feel better.”
A sugar and carbohydrate addict will use sugar and carbohydrates compulsively despite the negative consequences. The consequences differ for each person, but could include the following:
* Negative health effects such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and certain cancers.
* The financial impact of buying sugar and carbohydrate-rich binge foods.
* Emotional disturbances such as mood swings, depression and anxiety.
* Feeling spiritually empty, hopeless and meaningless.
* Weight gain
Eating to live or living to eat?
Eating in response to our reward system
Our food intake is regulated by two drives – the homeostatic and hedonic pathways. The homeostatic pathway controls energy balance by alerting us to eat when we have a physical need to replenish. In contrast, the hedonic system has less to do with internal signalling and more to do with how the body interacts with the external world. The hedonic system is driven by the dopamine reward centre in the brain, which causes us to eat foods even when we are not physically hungry. This system can override the homeostatic pathway during periods of relative energy abundance by increasing the desire to consume foods that are highly palatable.
This explains why we often find ourselves eating dessert after a meal even though we know we are full.
Hormonal hunger
Hormones affect the way the body’s organs and tissues absorb nutrients. When people abuse a substance such as sugar, it creates changes that in essence confuse our bodies. Sugar specifically reduces the body’s ability to suppress the hunger-promoting hormone ghrelin, thereby enhancing hunger signalling to the brain. In addition, sugar interferes with leptin signalling. Leptin is a hormone that tells your brain that it’s not hungry, and also turns on energy and fat burning. Eating too much sugar, therefore, makes you eat even more sugar in a vicious cycle that promotes weight gain and chronic disease.
Do you like sugar? So does:
* Inflammation.
* Yeast.
* Arthritis.
* Diabetes.
* Cancer.
* High blood pressure.
* Addiction.
In summary, sugar and carbs alter your body’s hormone signalling to make you hungry for more, while also putting your body into fat-storage mode.
Evolutionary propensity to become sugar addicts
Up until approximately 150 years ago, sugar was not a staple in our diets. Fast-forward to today, and we are consuming over 50kg of sugar a year. This equates to about 29 teaspoons (both added and natural) a day with 75 percent of that from junk food and soda.
Researchers, such as paediatric endocrinologist Professor Robert Lustig, from the University of California San Francisco, surmise that humans’ predisposition to become sugar addicts gave us an evolutionary advantage in the caveman days. Sweetness was a signal to our Palaeolithic ancestors that something was safe to eat, because no sweet foods are poisonous in the short run. Our ancestors only stumbled across sweet treats – a fruit-filled tree, say – for a limited period each year. This harvest period preceded months of winter deprivation, and the sugar helped them stock up their fat stores in preparation. The trouble is that today sugary foods are always available, so the evolutionary advantage is lost. Now, all sugar does is make us sick, fat and addicted.
Sugar makes you fat and sick
The recent launch of the US documentary Fed Up, as well as multiple headlines in newspapers and magazines, herald sugar’s move from the shadows of suspicion into the spotlight of the condemned. Sugar is now seen as a potentially central culprit behind the rising global rates of obesity and related diseases, including type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and heart disease.
Many scientists argue that sugar’s contribution to chronic disease is far more sinister than the “empty calories” it contributes to the diet (as was thought in the past). There is compelling research showing that eating and drinking sugar increases your risk for developing obesity. Traditional “wisdom” claims that this is merely because sugar contributes empty calories that are devoid of other beneficial and filling nutrients, meaning that it’s easy to overindulge on sugar without feeling full or nutritionally satisfied. However, recent evidence contradicts this thinking, showing that the fructose in sugar actually switches on fat production and storage, as well as hunger. Fructose especially increases those particularly dangerous belly fat deposits.
Research shows that sugar also raises your risk for developing type 2 diabetes. This is partially because sugar makes you fat, and the fatter you are, the more likely you are to develop diabetes. But fructose may also increase your diabetes risk all on its own by raising blood sugar and insulin levels, and promoting insulin resistance. Scientific studies also show that sugar increases heart and metabolic disease risk factors: it raises fats and blood vessel-clogging small dense LDL cholesterol in the blood, increases blood pressure and promotes inflammation.
The evidence for sugar’s detrimental health effects is strong. We need not wait for more proof of sugar’s deadly effects before drastically cutting our consumption.
The food industry wants to keep you using
Since the 1980s, we’ve been led to believe that fat-free is good for us. To make food cheaper and easier to produce, fat is removed from food and high-fructose corn syrup and other sugars are added. This creates highly palatable food which feeds our chemical and behavioural addiction. Of course, we end up consuming more of these foods than our bodies need. It’s difficult to get away from these processed and manufactured foods.Switch on the television, take a look at the internet.
What’s being advertised?
Breakfast cereals loaded with sugar, soft drinks, fat-free dairy alternatives – each one promising a slim body, more energy or a positive feeling. No wonder we’re confused about what we should be eating and what is good for us.
Two award-winning authors and investigative journalists, Gary Taubes and Michael Moss, have separately uncovered evidence of the processed food industry’s complicity in the global epidemic of obesity and related diseases. It appears that the industry has known about sugar’s addictive and deadly potential all along, and it has intentionally covered up the evidence in order to keep us using.
In an article titled “Big sugar’s sweet little lies – How the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill?”, Taubes explains that over the past 40 years, the sugar industry has meddled in public policy and rigged scientific evidence to shed doubt on the many study results suggesting that sugar makes people sick. The Sugar Association has funded various studies and lined scientists’ pockets to, as internal documents put it, “maintain research as a main prop of the industries’ defence” – ensuring that sugar’s negative health effects can never be confirmed. Doctors were even paid to defend sugar’s place in a healthy diet.
Sadly, it appears that the sugar industry’s strategy has been successful up to now. Sugar-industry-funded studies were among the main pillars of evidence that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used when deciding to uphold sugar’s place in healthy dietary guidelines and designate it as Gras (generally recognised as safe).
When health authorities, including the World Health Organisation, have occasionally warned the public to reduce their sugar consumption, the sugar industry has openly attacked them. In his book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Moss reveals that other processed food giants are also in it for the money at the expense of world health.
After uncovering a processed food industry secret meeting report and talking to executives and scientists from multinationals such as Kraft, Kellogg’s, Pepsi, Unilever and Mars, Moss explains that industry has made concerted efforts to devise the magic combination of ingredients that will keep you craving your next hit. “Food inventors and scientists spend a huge amount of time formulating the perfect amount of sugar that will send us over the moon, and send products flying off the shelves,” says Moss. They’ve even dubbed the perfect sweet spot the “bliss point”.
Moss agrees that for certain people, sugar-filled processed food is actually just as addictive as some drugs. But the industry says food differs from drugs in that it can’t reach the same threshold. Though Moss acknowledges this truth, he says: “In some ways, getting unhooked on foods is harder than getting unhooked on narcotics because you can’t go cold turkey. You can’t just stop eating.”
Society often views obese or overweight people as lazy and gluttonous; “Why don’t they eat less or just say no?” is a question often asked. We wouldn’t have a world facing a health crisis if it was that simple. The truth is that sugar and carbs are addictive. We sugar and carb addicts are not weak-willed, chocolate-guzzling individuals. Instead, we suffer from the disease of addiction.
A word on sugar substitutes
Considering humans’ innate sweet tooth and the growing public awareness around sugar’s adverse health effects, toxicity and addictive potential, it’s not surprising that there’s a high demand for non-nutritional (effectively zero calorie) sugar substitutes. Yet people are wary of turning to man-made, synthetic, artificial sweeteners (including aspartame, saccharin, cyclamate and sucralose), as they have been attributed with their own suspicious health effects, not least among these, cancer. Natural sugar substitutes such as stevia are becoming far more attractive, but unfortunately, they have infamously bitter aftertastes. Recent reports indicate that sweet taste alone may be enough to boost your body’s fat-storing hormone, insulin, and spark carbohydrate cravings even in the absence of carbohydrates and calories.
Dr David Ludwig, professor of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, warns that non-caloric sweeteners may:
* Worsen your sweet tooth and increase sugar cravings.
* Be addictive (if rodent studies are anything to go by).
* Increase your chances for becoming overweight or obese.
* Increase your chances of developing metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.
We discourage any form of sweetener during the 30-day challenge compiled above. As a sugar addict, the last thing you need to do is worsen your sweet tooth, and sugar and carb cravings.
* Campbell is a registered dietician