Taming The White Crystalline Monster!

By now I don’t need to tell you how deleterious sugar is to our health? So why do we eat it? Why, when it clearly makes us fat and sick, do we not give it up? The answer is simple. We’re addicted to it! No joke. If you think I am embellishing, countless clinical trials have compared sugar’s addictive properties to alcohol, cocaine, morphine, and other narcotics. (1,2,3,4,5,6) William Dufty discusses the addictive properties of sugar in his book Sugar Blues, drawing comparisons to narcotics like opium. (7) He, like many others in North America, was once addicted to sugar. He was a sugar addict; chronically sick, diabetic and dependent on allopathic medications for a variety of health issues. And despite his failing health, he was unable to give up his Mr. Brownstone. When he finally did give it up, he suffered with severe withdrawal symptoms.

Processed food giants are well aware of sugar’s addictive properties. They capitalize on it to sell us their empty food products. In fact, almost all processed foods today contain sugar in at least one of its multiple forms. Food manufacturers, like inner city drug pushers, have us chemically addicted to their products. They now employ teams of food scientists, psychologists, and statistical analysts to establish the precise “bliss point” of their products: that perfect level of sweetness/savouriness that lights up the pleasure centres in the brain like the 4th of July. Basically, food scientists add a little of this, take out a little of that, et voila! They have a biochemically irresistible food product with a very low satiety index. Hence, once you start, you are powerless stop. Hmmmm… Perhaps those Lucky Charms® are not so lucky after all!  

So, now that we understand that we are not McCrayZ - that there is a strong physiological basis for our sugar cravings, and that we are not unique in our dread of 3 days without it; what can we do about it? How do we tame the impregnable white crystalline monster? Tune in tomorrow and I will tell you…

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1. Ahmed, Serge H.a,b; Guillem, Karinea,b; Vandaele, Younaa,b Sugar addiction, Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care: July 2013 - Volume 16 - Issue 4 - p 434-439

2. Avena NM, Rada P, Hoebel BG. 2008: Evidence for sugar addiction: Behavioral and neurochemical effects of intermittent, excessive sugar intake. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews. Vol 32, pp. 20-39.

3. Colantuoni C, Schwenker J, McCarthy J, et al. 2001: Excessive sugar intake alters binding to dopamine and mu-opioid receptors in the brain. Neuroreport. Vol 12, Issue 16, pp. 3549-3552.

4. Colantuoni. C., et al. 2002: Evidence that intermittent, excessive sugar intake causes endogenous opioid dependence. Obes Res 2002 Jun 10(6):478-88.

5. Jacques A, Chaaya N, Beecher K, Ali SA, Belmer A, Bartlett S. The impact of sugar consumption on stress driven, emotional and addictive behaviors. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2019 Aug;103:178-199.

6. Klenowski, P., Masroor R. Shariff, M., et al. 2016: Prolonged Consumption of Sucrose in a Binge-Like Manner, Alters the Morphology of Medium Spiny Neurons in the Nucleus Accumbens Shell. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, Vol 10

7. Dufty. W. 1975: Sugar Blues. Warner Books. New York