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Author: Jenn
Date: 11-21-04 08:59
i found this article at
http://www.eatingwell.com/articles_recipes/nutrition/sweet_addiction.html
basically it talks about sugar 'dependency' and stuff.... i found it pretty interesting!!! i can certainly say that at times i feel very much addicted!!!!
so.... what do you think???
Copyright EatingWell magazine, Fall 2002
Sweet Addiction
Can our instinctive love of sugar turn to chemical dependence?
By Robin Edelman, MS, RD, CDE
Long ago, Peg Duvall fell into a trap. As a teenager in the 1950s, Duvall studied diligently and led a life surrounded by high school friends. But she had a hard time relaxing at night. Around 10 o’clock, she and her brother would meet in the kitchen for a snack. Between the two of them they would go through half a loaf of bread, piling each piece with sugar and cinnamon and toasting it in the oven. Often they would chase down the toast with sweetened cereal and ice cream.
After an hour of banter and laughter, Duvall would begin to feel tired, descending from the euphoria of the sugar rush. She could finally relax enough to fall asleep.
Four years later, as a freshman at Cornell University, demands were intense and although Duvall continued to achieve high grades, the stress of academics and social life took its toll. Studying at her dorm-room desk she would feel “wiped out” and head down to one of the snack wagons that parked outside the university residences each evening. Night after night, a candy bar or pastry helped to pick her up and give her a sense of control—at least for a while.
The pattern never stopped, even in adult life. As a successful software engineering technician, Duvall couldn’t get through the energy slumps that hit her in repeated waves throughout the afternoon without trudging down the hall to the office candy machine for a PayDay or a packet of Chuckles. On the commute from work, she would stop to buy a big package of Lorna Doones. By the time she arrived home, half the package was gone. She’d stash the remainder under the car seat for her next drive.
To Peg Duvall, who is remarkably open in talking about her eating habits and weight problems, sugar is a drug. It picks her up when she’s tired, calms her down when she’s stressed. Whenever life hands Duvall a challenge, she seeks sweets for comfort, sometimes morning, noon and night, ever aware that sugar’s high will inevitably sabotage her energy and take its toll on her body. “One bite leads to another. One cookie leads to the whole package,” Duvall, who has sought nutrition counseling, laments. “I’m miserable shortly after I’m comforted, but I still seek sweets. This is insanity.”
TELLTALE SIGNS
Late one night in 1999 in a research laboratory on the gothic, ivy-cloaked campus of Princeton University, a student saw something that casts a new light on Peg Duvall’s cravings.
Neuroscientist Bart Hoebel had been studying animals under the influence for years. For a month, the psychology professor and his research team fed rats a regular chow and a sugar solution, comparable to the sweetness of fruit canned in heavy syrup. As the researchers expected, the rats preferred the sugar water to the regular chow. But when a drug was used to block the effects of the sugar in the rats’ brains, the results astounded the researchers.
Carlo Colantuoni, now at Johns Hopkins University but then an undergraduate working with the team, routinely entered the animal lab late in the evening to feed the rats or study their behavior. On each visit, his arrival elicited a response like a jingling Pavlovian bell. “They would hear me open the door and immediately get excited. Some were so excited that they would rip apart the sipper bottles [filled with a 25 percent glucose solution].” After a month, the rats predictably went into a feeding frenzy when the sugar solution was refilled, consuming twice the amount they had at the beginning of the test.
On this particular night, Colantuoni and another student had arrived to observe the rats’ reactions after the drug had been administered to block the effects of sugar in their brains. Colantuoni found the rats in an unusually agitated state, with their heads shaking, their teeth chattering and their forepaws quivering with tremors—in essence showing the telltale signs of withdrawal. Hoebel and his group had seen similar reactions in rats addicted to morphine and cocaine, but it was an unexpected moment in their experiments with sugar.
For close to 25 years, researchers have known that the human attraction to sugar and addiction to drugs occur in the same pathways of the brain. But the Princeton research now suggests that our attraction to sweeteners may have the potential to extend beyond a simple yearning into the realm of chemical dependence. As sugar consumption rises at an alarming rate, wreaking havoc with the nation’s health, the question of culpability looms. Does overeating sugar constitute a mere failure of willpower or can sugar’s sweet lure actually “hook” us?
“The symptoms from sugar withdrawal were not as pronounced as what we see with morphine, but it was withdrawal,” Hoebel says. “This particular study was initially focused on depression in relation to food intake. But as soon as we observed withdrawal symptoms we switched gears to study the animals’ response to sugar dependency.” When the investigators reintroduced the sweet solution, the rats demonstrated bingeing, another classic behavior associated with substance abuse.
In a recently published paper detailing the research, Hoebel says that telltale changes in the brain chemistry of the sweet-loving rats were consistent with observations of rats on morphine and heroin.
Hoebel adds that the results demonstrate chemical dependency, but are not yet conclusive proof of addiction. Peg Duvall says simply that she is addicted to sugar.
BINGEING TO SURVIVE
Hard-wired from birth to seek out sweet tastes, the human body evolved a survival instinct 2 million years ago that steered Homo sapiens to sweet foods dense with energy, like ripe mangoes hanging from the tree, berries clustered on the vine and honey seeping from the comb.
Thousands of generations later, that primitive impulse, in a land of overabundant processed foods and sedentary lifestyles, works against easy weight control and a healthy energy balance. Scientists are now asking if our natural inclination to eat sweets can go too far. Can we lose control of our hunger for sugar, the very taste that aided our ancestors’ survival?
To understand just what happened in the Princeton lab, enter the brain’s everyday pathways for a moment. When we eat a piece of cake, the sweet taste triggers the brain to produce opioids, chemical messengers that identify this taste as desirable. At the same time, the sweetness triggers the brain to produce dopamine, another chemical messenger that works with memory to urge us to pursue this rewarding taste in the future.
Opioids produce love at first bite. Through its effect on memory, dopamine produces love at first sight. So powerful is the response that the simple sight of a desirable food can elevate our dopamine levels and consequently our motivation to seek out the food, one reason that advertising can be so effective.
The withdrawal that Hoebel’s team witnessed in the rats resulted from suddenly blocking opioids in the brain with Naloxone, a drug often used experimentally to test for narcotic dependence. “We’ve known that sugar triggers release of the brain’s natural opioids,” Hoebel explains, “but here the brain is getting addicted to its own opioids as it would to morphine or heroin. Addictive drugs give a bigger effect, but it is essentially the same process.”
Granted, the experiments occurred in rats, not humans, and humans on any given day may be reacting to complex cultural cues to which rats are not susceptible. But, says Hoebel, “the big news is that for the first time we have demonstrated sugar dependency in animals. It might change the way we look at food cravings. It puts an excessive sugar habit in the realm of an addictive disorder rather than a failure of willpower.”
The human weakness for binge eating can be traced to our primitive ancestors, says Roy Wise, chief of the Behavioral Neuroscience Branch of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and an expert on brain circuitry. “The brain mechanisms capable of mediating addiction evolved long before the invention of the syringe, the harnessing of fire or the development of barrels to store alcohol,” Wise notes.
Researchers theorize that opioids played a key role for humans who foraged, keeping them alive during periods of famine by encouraging them to eat huge amounts of foods that were available—fruits in season, for example—urging them to gorge beyond satiety. Hominid researchers have observed wild apes bingeing on ripe figs and other fruits abundant during brief seasons. The weight gained because of such gorging helped the animals through leaner times.
But Peg Duvall, an educated, professional woman living in the land of plenty, doesn’t have to worry about times of food scarcity. The excess weight that she carries, instead of helping her to survive, has become a physical and emotional burden. “My weight is too high; my energy and self-esteem are low,” Duvall says. And as the stress in her life escalates, traveling with her husband to move their home from Annapolis to Florida where they will care for his ailing parents, Duvall feels herself again out of control, vulnerable to sugar’s powerful lure.
ADDED SUGARS
North Americans crave sweets. Food marketers have capitalized on our collective sweet tooth by adding sugars, of one type or another, to virtually every type of prepared food we buy, from vegetable soups to bottled waters. We eat and drink an average equivalent of 20 teaspoons of these added sugars per day (80 grams), mostly in the form of sucrose (as table sugar) and fructose (as high-fructose corn syrup in soft drinks). We love and hate sugar more than any of its carbohydrate cousins, and blame it for social problems that range from mayhem in classrooms to murder in City Hall. Medical professionals say that the impact from constantly overindulging in sweets can be devastating, from obesity to diabetes, high triglycerides that can lead to heart disease and strokes, and disruptive spike-and-fall energy patterns as blood sugar (glucose) levels surge and plummet.
Fortunately, not everyone experiences the same strong sugar cravings that drive Peg Duvall. For some, sweets inspire only a mild preference, but the bottom line is that modern society as a whole often displays the evolutionary behavior of those apes under the fig tree: glucose gluttony. Current concerns have blossomed because we are bingeing not on the natural sugars in ripe produce, but on products packed with added sugars and little or none of the fiber, vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients in whole foods. Although the human body responds indiscriminately to both natural and added sugars, the latter typically are found in higher amounts and in foods that offer quick energy but little of the beneficial nutrition needed for optimum health.
On a typical day, an average teenage boy will consume 136 grams of added sugars, a mountain of sweeteners equivalent to 34 teaspoons of table sugar. Although the USDA advises consumers to limit consumption to 40 grams, or 10 teaspoons, of added sugars per day, North Americans over the age of 2 consume, on average, twice that amount. Once woven into a person’s lifestyle, and chemically influencing the brain’s control circuits, all that cumulative sugar consumption can reap sinister results.
The American Heart Association’s Committee on Nutrition recently informed health-care professionals that sugar consumption promotes obesity and raises triglycerides (blood fats). Any extra calories consumed are converted into body fat for storage, and sugar is a fuel that delivers calories with great efficiency. Extra fat in the body usually produces extra fat in the blood along with added body weight.
CHILDHOOD RHYTHMS
Pediatrician David Ludwig sees child after obese child whose life has been ruled by sugar. Ludwig says that he can trace some of the excessive weight gain to carbonated soft drinks, sweetened baked goods, candy and sweetened fruit drinks.
“When a heavy child eats the equivalent of 20 teaspoons of added sugar a day, 320 calories go straight into additional weight gain,” says Ludwig, director of the Obesity Program at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Over the course of a year, these daily infusions of sugar add up to the energy equivalent of 33 pounds of new body fat. “Once a child has established this pattern of eating, it’s a very difficult rhythm to break.”
Besides stimulating the brain’s opioid and dopamine levels, sugar can also cause hormonal changes in the body, changes that encourage a person to seek sweets. A doughnut, a soda or a meal of refined carbohydrates and sugar causes blood glucose to spike up quickly. “What goes up must come down,” Ludwig warns. In response to the glucose spike, the body secretes large amounts of insulin into the bloodstream, dropping the glucose quickly and drastically, to a level lower than normal. The person becomes hungry (a natural reaction to low blood glucose), often tired, and craves food that will rapidly restore blood sugar.
This response sets up repeated cycles of higher than normal blood glucose, insulin surges, drastic blood-glucose drops—a roller-coaster with rapid spikes and energy crashes, symptoms all too familiar to Peg Duvall.
In a society of cheap, overabundant food choices, the brain’s natural survival instincts work more effectively to stockpile calories than to achieve a leaner body. This is becoming alarmingly apparent when the effects of liquid sugars, today being consumed as never before in all manner of sweetened drinks, are tracked.
David Ludwig led a research team that followed the habits and weight gain of 548 children between 11 and 12 years old in Boston-area public schools. At the study’s start, one-quarter of the children were obese and on average the children drank less than 15 ounces of sugar-sweetened drinks daily (including soda and noncarbonated beverages with added sugar). By the end of two academic years, obesity increased by 9.3 percent and the sweetened-drink consumption had risen by 20 percent. Ludwig determined that the odds of becoming obese—now the number one pediatric health problem—increased significantly with an additional daily soft drink. Ludwig and many of his colleagues also believe that calories consumed this way can be deceptive. Animals, including humans, are less likely to compensate by cutting back on food when extra calories come in liquid form. Children, now offered easy access to sodas and other sweetened drinks at most schools, appear especially vulnerable.
Immediately after birth, infants prefer sweets over sour, salty and bitter tastes. According to Elliott Blass, a researcher in the Neuroscience and Behavior Program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, sugar can calm a newborn in pain. Doctors and nurses have used sweet solutions in neonatal nurseries for years to curb crying and reduce the dosages of narcotic painkillers.
In the ’90s, five separate studies demonstrated that sugar numbs the pain and stress of medical procedures for infants; the procedures ranged from heel sticks (for obtaining blood samples) to circumcisions. So effective is the antidote that one company recently developed Sweet-Ease, a sugar-and-water solution packaged as a dip for pacifiers given to infants during painful medical procedures. While small amounts of sugar solution to calm an infant do not shape childhood habits, many nutritionists are beginning to fear that the daily use of sweet substances to reward and mollify children throughout their formative years may be setting lifelong patterns of sugar abuse.
SUGAR FIXES
As Peg Duvall knows only too well, sugar comforts as it pleases. Recently retired from a demanding job, her rough days at the office are over, but tough emotional situations lie ahead. Although she has attended nutritional counseling to get her sugar cravings under control, she recently reverted to the old pattern. Packing up to move to Florida, as she weeds through boxes of belongings that remind her of friends from the past 30 years whom she must now leave, she says that she found herself chewing on a PayDay candy bar to ease the stress, and later finishing off half a family-size package of cookies before thinking twice. On a bad day, she calculates, she exceeds 200 grams of added sugars, ranging from pastries at breakfast to desserts at dinner, an addition of 800 nutritionally empty calories.
Duvall can laugh that desserts spelled backwards is stressed, and she knows that she is far from alone in seeking sweets for relief. Therapists report that sweet foods are often consumed in large quantities by recovering drug addicts, alcoholics and smokers. Research animals will turn to sweets when investigators remove addictive drugs.
While the overconsumption of sugars is not in the same class of threats to health as heroin and other opiates, it does contribute directly to obesity and related diseases, which America pays for through health-care dollars at ten times the amount it spends on drug addiction. But does every chocoholic need a 12-step program? Although similar biological mechanisms are at play, sugar cravings and drug addiction are not equally burdensome. For most people, gradually altering lifestyle choices (see “Breaking a Sugar Habit,” below) and seeking behavior-change therapy should be enough. Weaning oneself from overindulging in sweets is, according to the researchers, a challenge, but not quite in the same league as a heroin addict entering treatment.
Hoebel’s research with rats at Princeton raises questions about whether sugar belongs with the classic addictive narcotics or with things we simply crave, such as love and affection. At this point, he is careful to use the term “sugar dependency” rather than “addiction,” and to remind the media that his findings were based on rats, not humans. Yet his findings have opened a door that many hope will lead to more investigations and help for people like Duvall, who strive to control sugar cravings and who may have a chemical dependence that makes their dopamine moments more debilitating than those of someone with a mild attraction to sweets.
Sugar, of course, is not a lone villain in promoting obesity in children or adults. A lack of exercise can devastate health, and surplus calories from other carbohydrates, protein and fats can and do contribute to a national epidemic of dietary health problems. In fact, neuroscientists note that fat elicits opioid and dopamine responses in palatable foods similar to those stimulated by sugar. But sugar is our taste buds’ first love.
Perhaps most discouraging, sugars surround us. Sweet snacks and drinks beckon wherever humans congregate while working, shopping and traveling. Advertisements and easy availability work against the internal signals that prompt us to curb our intake of sweet foods when we feel satiated. Hidden sugars abound, even in foods where we least expect them. “The system worked well when sweet foods were scarce and exercise was high, pre-automation and pre-television,” researcher Blass muses.
One approach that consumer advocates like the Center for Science in the Public Interest have taken in the last few years is to petition the Food and Drug Administration to require that food labels specify the amount of added sugar in processed foods. Presently labels do not distinguish between a food’s natural sugars and those added during processing. Peg Duvall says that she knows all about added sugars, and although she studies packages and food-composition guides to avoid sugar, having added sugars categorized on the labels would help her identify problem foods.
Clearly, many consumers need to be more aware of the potential effects of developing a sugar habit and of the not-so-obvious presence of added sugars in everything from soups to fitness drinks. Sugar consumption, in the form of added sweeteners, including high-fructose corn syrup, has risen more than 30 percent over the last two decades to 149 pounds per person—a figure that dwarfs the single-digit estimated annual consumption of North America’s early colonial settlers, for whom sweets were a precious treat.
Getting back to a healthy level of sugar consumption is no small challenge for many. As Bart Hoebel’s research shows, there is more at work in those who feel hooked on sugar than a simple lack of dietary willpower. It’s a daily struggle, but Duvall continues to have hope. “I know what it takes to get through this,” she explains. “Healthy foods, exercise, rest and support. I need to make better choices and stop digging my grave with a spoon.”
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Breaking a Sugar Habit
While overindulging in sweets can be a difficult habit to change, it is easier to separate the challenging task into small, manageable steps...once you know what to look for.
1. Become a sugar sleuth. Always read the ingredient lists of processed foods. American food labels make it difficult to identify added sugar. The mandated “Sugars” line includes both natural and added sugars. Compare brands and aim low when making a choice. If sugar or one of its cohorts—corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, sucrose or dextrose—appears within the top three ingredients, consider choosing another brand.
2. Monitor your habits. Keep a food diary: Carry a small notebook and jot down everything sweet you eat, as soon as you eat it. Note your mood, location and activity. Be honest—this is not a public document.
3.Recognize your routine. After several days, review the diary. Are there obvious triggers leading you to overeat: office coffee breaks near a vending machine, pastries where you buy a morning paper, a box of candies on the counter?
4. Identify quick wins. Look at your habits and target one behavior to change—perhaps substituting an apple for that mid-afternoon Snickers bar or switching to unsweetened sparkling water from cola with one meal a day.
5.Fill up on healthy foods. A diet high in vegetables and whole grains, along with lean protein and healthful fats, provides long-lasting energy, controls hunger and keeps you off the glucose roller-coaster. Eat fruit to calm your sweet tooth. Eating up to five servings a day won’t trigger a sugar spike or calorie splurge.
6.Add your own sweetener. Buy unsweetened products when available. Add half the sugar to unsweetened applesauce or rely on other flavors, such as cinnamon, to enhance the taste. A teaspoon of chocolate-flavored syrup in a glass of milk adds only one-quarter of the sugar found in presweetened milks like Nesquik.
7.Cut back purposefully but gradually. If you already sweeten beverages and cereals from your own sugar bowl, reduce in stages. One timeless trick is to cut down by half. Instead of two heaping teaspoons of sugar in your coffee, use one. A few weeks later, switch to half a teaspoon.
8.Wean yourself off sweetened drinks (regular and diet). Quench your thirst with neutral flavors like water (plain or carbonated). Add squirts of fresh lemon or lime to spark it up. If you don’t enjoy the blander taste, add a splash of fruit juice to 1 cup of sparkling water. Avoid artificially sweetened drinks: they save calories, but they do not retrain your taste buds to appreciate natural flavors.
9.Dole out sweet indulgences rather than attempting total abstinence. This works best for people with mild to moderate sugar attractions. Occasionally savor small amounts of the candy or baked sweets you enjoy. People who try to deny themselves all sweets too often give up. If you feel totally hooked on sugar, consult a health-care professional.
10.Budget, balance and get moving. When you enjoy an intentional indulgence, balance the extra calories at the next meal or burn the extra energy with a brisk walk or other exercise. People who succeed with long-term diet changes take lapses in stride by getting back on track quickly.
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Nutrition Editor Robin Edelman is also the diabetes prevention and control administrator for the Vermont Department of Health.
Jenn
319 / 289 / 250 / 140
Feb 2004/Aug 2004/New Years 2005 /Ultimate!
I am Microsoft of Borg. Resistance izkx GPF 0x5654 8820 Application RESIST.EXE has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.
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Author: LeeV
Date: 11-21-04 10:01
I've never been much of a sweet-eater and most of the desserts or treats I eat these days are sugar-free, so I couldn't say if "sugar withdrawal" is real or not. I'm sure for some people it probably is :)
220/175/130
Began New Lifestyle June 18, 2004
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Author: joan
Date: 11-21-04 16:20
I crave sweets. Any kind, anywhere. Splenda has helped and they now have Splenda that is half real sugar that is easier to cook with. I have not tried it.
Some days I wonder if I could go a full 24 hours without something sweet - much less all of the hidden sugar in foods that we don't even think sugar is in such a bread and soup.
Some days I think I could live on sugar and sugar alone. Take the Krispy Kream Donut. Flour, fat and sugar - the main food groups my body craves.
Once upon a time, about a year and a half ago, I was able to stay on a diet during the day knowing that at night, in front of the TV, I would have my small helping of sugar - in different forms. Usually ice cream or sherbet.
Thanks for the artical. At least now I know that I'm not completely crazy and there just might be some scientific reason that I crave anything sweet.
Joan
255/225/155
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