Is Sugar Addictive?
It’s almost Halloween. The time of year where we wear fun costumes, plan outings to pumpkin patches, and get our adrenaline pumping with a visit to a haunted house. But the scariest part can be that giant bowl of candy for the trick-or-treaters. Or is it?
So many headlines tell us that sugar is addictive and can cause a range of health problems from inflammation to diabetes. Let’s take a look at the facts…
Food Addiction
Maybe you’ve seen the news claiming sugar is as addictive as drugs, and that our brains react the same to both. If we dig into the actual literature, we can find a few faults in these statements. First, most of this research has been done on animals. While this is an important step in helping scientists understand things, humans don’t have identical brains to mice. Some of the studies really like to push the fact that rats scarfed down mass quantities of sugar. The reports tended to gloss over the part where the rats were stressed and had been restricted access to sugar. Another often cited study shows that human brains react in the same way when eating sugar or taking drugs. Again this fails to mention these same pathways are activated when you smell a sweet, cuddly baby or pet your puppy.
Types of Sugar
Have you seen those “healthy” swap recipes using agave or maple syrup instead of white sugar? Spoiler: your body can’t tell the difference. From a molecular standpoint, the sugar molecules are all the same, so it won’t matter if the sugar was from a candy bar or from an apple. Either way, sugar provides fuel for your body to do all the things you enjoy. Glucose, one form of sugar, is your brain’s preferred energy source. Meaning that our body actually needs sugar to maintain energy throughout the day. Bottom line is sugar is sugar is sugar.
Disease Risk
Sugar intake has been blamed for many health risks. Everything from acne to heart disease to cancer has been linked to excessive sugar consumption. Again, digging further into the research we can see that this correlation has been overstated. It can be tempting to jump to the conclusion that people with high sugar intake have a greater risk for diseases; therefore, if we eliminate sugar then our risk goes down. Unfortunately that is not how bodies work. A research team concluded “based on high quality evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCT), systematic reviews and meta-analyses of cohort studies that singling out added sugars as unique culprits for metabolically based diseases such as … diabetes and cardiovascular disease appears inconsistent with modern, high quality evidence and is very unlikely to yield health benefits.”
Sugar has also been reported to be inflammatory. You might hear the word “inflammation” and think it’s a bad thing, but this is your bodies response to anything that might try to cause your body harm. In the studies that show that sugar causes inflammation, participants are consuming straight sugar. In reality, metabolism is much more complicated when you eat a cookie or cupcake rather than straight sugar. The stress of trying to avoid sugar can be more harmful than actually eating some - think of the anxiety, constant food thoughts and stress that comes with trying to be “sugar-free” or “watch your sugar intake”. Fun fact, stress is inflammatory!
It might feel a bit scary to let go of your rules around sugar. Just like there are no monsters hiding in your closet, Halloween candy isn’t something to be afraid of. Once you dig into the true factions about sugar, you can see that unnecessary fear has been generated by exaggerated and false claims.
