Is Sugar as Addictive as Cocaine?

Do you have a "sweet tooth" and like me, sometimes fail to stop yourself, against your better judgement, having multiple helpings of ice cream, cake or other sweet treats? I used to think I just had no will-power until I learned a bit more about this white, powdery substance.

I was fascinated to discover that eating sugar releases opioids and dopamine into our bodies. This dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is a crucial element of the “reward circuit” linked to addictive behavior. If you experience a dopamine hit, you feel a pleasurable “high” that you tend to want to experience again. Repeating that behavior again and again, causes your brain to adjust, reducing the amount of dopamine it releases. When this happens, the only way to continue to feel the same type of "high", is to keep repeating the behaviour, but with more sugar and at increasingly regular intervals.

So every time we eat sugar, we are reinforcing those neuropathways, which cause our brains to become more and more hardwired to desire it. This in turn builds up a tolerance, like with any other addictive substance. This leads to compulsive behavior, even though the negative effects such as weight gain, headaches and hormone imbalances are well understood.

Studies on rats actually show that sugar has been proven to be more addictive than cocaine. According to an article in www.Healthline.com, a study from Connecticut College in the USA, "has shown that Oreo cookies activate more neurons in the pleasure center of the rats’ brains than cocaine does (and just like humans, the rats would eat the filling first)". It is important to note here that these studies have yet to be done comprehensively on humans, but it is quite an interesting, if not alarming discovery nonetheless. However, the bottom line is, sugar is addictive and whether it is more or less so than cocaine, it is legally available everywhere, often found in foods you would never imagine and it is making many of us very sick.

Research has revealed that eating too much sugar can often lead to many chronic health problems such as increased risk of pre-diabetes, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, tooth decay, wrinkles, insomnia, dizziness, allergies, hair loss, ADD/ADHA, hypertension and Alzheimer's disease. Those who suffer from an autoimmune disease are apparently even more susceptible to sugar, due to the effect it has on the thyroid.

It is very important to understand that when we talk about sugar, it's about fructose and glucose. Glucose is metabolised and used up by most of the cells in our body and it is used as energy directly. However, fructose is mostly metabolised in the liver.

Why is that significant? Fructose is not used as energy, so we are inclined to eat more of it, because we are not getting energy from it. Our liver reacts badly when we eat fructose and stores it as fat. Excess insulin is produced in this process, which can lead to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and a whole host of other metabolic diseases. In addition, uric acid levels are raised in this situation, which causes high blood pressure, increasing our risk of hypertension and kidney disease. The other important thing to understand is that fructose does not turn off our appetite mechanisms. This means we have no limits for fructose and this is unique. We have a limit for every other type of food we eat.

What implications does that have? It gives us the capacity to consume huge amounts of apple juice or soft drinks, for example, without feeling full, because it does not turn on our appetite hormones. With any other food, appetite hormones, called leptin, are triggered in our brains and tell us that we have eaten enough and we feel full. The result of all of this is that fructose interferes with the leptin mechanism and leads us to not just eat more sugar but more than we need of other foods too.

Table sugar and high fructose corn syrup are made up of around 50% fructose. Agave syrup is made up of a whopping 90% fructose. I used to think that agave syrup was the healthy alternative to sugar. How wrong could I have been! Coconut sugar/nectar/syrup is also said to be a really healthy alternative, but with around 38-48% fructose, there is not a huge difference. What about natural honey and maple syrup? With 35-45% fructose, it is certainly a bit less. However, the best one to go for is date syrup, as it has the lowest fructose content at around 33% and it also tastes delicious. Some may use the argument that honey, maple and date syrup are totally natural, while sugar is processed, but unfortunately they have the same negative impact on our bodies and very few additional nutrients to make much difference.

One of the most important things to understand about our bodies is that they were not designed to cope with regular intakes of sugar all day long, year in, year out. We have not evolved fast enough from our hunter-gatherer days. Back then, sugar was extremely rare. We only found it very occasionally in things like berries or honeycomb and we had to expend a lot of energy to find it. As these delicacies were seldom found, our bodies were programmed to eat them to excess, become totally preoccupied by them and addicted to them. This encouraged the hunter-gatherers to gorge on them. The fructose was then duly metabolised by the liver and the excess was stored as fat. This fat was then used in times when food was scarce which enabled them to survive. We have not evolved and changed our DNA enough since then, but large amounts of sugar are now available all the time. Unfortunately this situation creates the conditions to make many of us very sick indeed. This is the opposite of survival.

As most of us now know, thanks to many awareness campaigns, sugar is hidden in so much of the processed food everyone eats on a regular basis. Few people read the labels of the foods they buy however and you can find sugar in anything from cooked roast chicken to wholemeal bread, tomato ketchup, tinned soups and pasta sauces. With a better understanding of the dangers of fructose, you can see why we keep going back for more and how we can have a tendency to regularly eat too much of so many other foods.

Many of us regularly eat large amounts of fruit, convinced that it is natural, full of fibre, vitamins and minerals. We are aware that it may well help us to fight off free radicals that are said to cause cancer and we think that the sugar content does not have the same damaging effect on our bodies as processed sugar. While much of this is true and the nutritional content is definitely way superior to that of a spoonful of sugar, syrup or honey, we do need to think back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors and remember that we are probably better off considering fruit as a treat because sugar is still very much part of the package. This is particularly true for those who are trying hard to lose weight and combat chronic disease. Even beautiful, fresh, seasonal fruit can often be a red flag, for a while at least, until we lose weight and achieve optimal health.

If you are looking for support to cut down or cut out sugar from your diet then I would highly recommend reading "I Quit Sugar" by Sarah Wilson. It is full of information, practical advice, recipes and makes a seemingly impossible undertaking doable.

Sources:

www.healthline.com

Sarah Wilson, Australian journalist, best-selling author, health coach and blogger

The Institute for Integrative Nutrition