There is a popular opinion that sugar causes a strong dependence akin to drug. We decided to check how true this statement is.
About sugar addiction is written on their resources culinary Bloggers, nutritionists And simple Supporters A healthy lifestyle. This is a very popular topic in glossy publications: they wrote about it in Psychologies, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar And Wonderzine. IN Marie Claire A whole was published series articles s tipsHow to overcome sugar dependence. Male magazine Men’s Health He invited his readers to find out if they have dependence on sugar. Reduced this topic and authoritative federal media, for example TASS, "News", "Moscow Komsomolets" and others.
Love for sugar Got it We are from distant ancestors who received carbohydrates and vitamins mainly from plant foods, including fruits and berries. The sweetness was a sign that the fetus was ripe and it can be eaten. Sugar gave our distant ancestors energy, as he gives us now. But sugar in its pure form does not exist, so they consumed it coupled with fiber, vitamins, minerals and other useful nutrients. Accordingly, they physically could not eat as much sugar as we began to eat, having learned to separate it from the rest of the elements.
What we now call sugar is a substance sucrose, which consists of glucose and fructose. It does not contain any vitamins and minerals, which means that it does not bring any benefit to the body, unlike those sugars that our ancestors consumed with fruits and berries.
WHO Recommends It is not more than 50 g of sugar for an adult that is 10% of the recommended daily norm in 2000 kcal. At the same time, experts note that for health it will be better to reduce consumption in half - up to 25 g (this is about six teaspoons). And we are talking not only about the sugar in its pure form, which we add, for example, in coffee, and about sweets like cakes and sweets. Sugar is found in many products in our diet: fruits, sauces, juices and especially in sweet soda (up to 40 g in one bank!), And all this should also be included in the same 10%.
Most people do not comply with these recommendations. According to statistics, average American uses about 17 teaspoons of sugar per day, and Russian, according to the 2017 Ministry of Agriculture, about 25. This exceeds the WHO recommendations several times!
Why do we eat so much sweet? This Related With the fact that sugar causes the production of dopamine and serotonin - hormones of happiness. That is why a person who is excited, upset or scared, so wants something sweet-to eat stress. Sugar is really capable of quickly increasing mood (though only for a short time) - this is this its effect is similar to the effect of alcohol and drugs. Were researchIn the course of which the subjects carried out functional magnetic resonance tomography (FMRT), which shows that sugar activates the same brain zones as narcotic substances. In addition, in addition to stimulating the production of dopamine and serotonin, sugar also suppresses The allocation of cortisol, which is called a stress hormone.
It turns out that sugar is an ideal means to combat a bad mood? Everything would be fine, but, firstly, excessive sugar can cause many health problems, for example Cardiovascular diseases, obesity, deterioration memory, depression And even Cancer. And secondly, over time, the brain ceases to produce the necessary hormones on its own, and a person has to replenish them with another dose of sweets, and more than the previous ones. So it is formed addiction.
The first to get used to sugar and harm from it He spoke British nutritionist John Yudkinwho in 1972 wrote the book "Clean, White, Deadly Heater." He assertedWhat does not lead to obesity and other problems at all, as previously thought, but sugar, which also causes dependence. Nevertheless, then no one listened to him-there was too much the lobby of the food industry, which was just rebuilt to the production of products with low fat content, improving its taste with sweeteners. Yudkin was declared almost crazy, the reaction to his book was so negative that for a long time, many repulsed many critical studies about sugar.
But in 2009, an endocrinologist from the University of California Robert Lastig came from a hour and a half a lecture About the dangers of sugar, where John Yudkin called the provids, who was the first to try to reveal the public eyes. Lastig urged to treat sugar as a toxin causing toxin along with alcohol and tobacco. The lecture scored almost 19 million views on YouTube, and Yudkin’s book from a dusty waste paper has become a bibliographic rarity. With Eraser agree And Lewis Cantley, a cellular biologist from Harvard. He claims that sugar addiction delays a person worse than cocaine, nicotine and any other existing drug. Cantley himself has not eaten sugar since the 70s of the last century.
In 2002, biologists conducted experiment On rats: animals were not fed for 12 hours, and then for 12 hours they opened access to the stern and sweetened water. After a month of such a diet, rats of rats observed all signs of drug addiction: uncontrolled craving for sugar, withdrawal syndrome, similar to opioid, overeating, etc. In 2007, another group of scientists spent a similar studyWhere rats were offered to choose from water sweetened by sugarin, or cocaine. Eight times a day, animals could choose between two levers, the effect of pressing each they twice was given to try before the start of the experiment. One lever led to intravenous cocaine injection, and the other for 20 seconds gave access to sweet water. 94% of rats preferred sugar, and an increase in the dose of cocaine did not change the result. Scientists came to the conclusion that sugar leads to a much stronger dependence than cocaine.
In addition, some biologists They thinkthat sugar dependence can develop into alcoholic or narcotic, it increases the likelihood that a person will also apply to other stimulants.
Nevertheless, not all researchers agree that sugar dependence, comparable to narcotic, can really develop in humans. Scientists from a number of European universities, united in a project called Neurofast, several years studied the connection between food, addiction and stress. IN result They did not find evidence that any food, food supplement or ingredient, with the exception of any alcohol and coffee, can cause addiction.
In 2016, a group of scientists systematized everything that at that time was known about the effect of sugar on living organisms, and I concludedthat, despite the results of experiments with rats, there is no evidence that they are also fair for people. One of their main arguments was that the addiction and withdrawal syndrome causes not sugar itself, but the frequency of its intake in the body, that is, the alternation of uncontrolled consumption with a complete rejection of it, which does not occur in ordinary life.
However, in 2019, California doctors conducted study, during which they asked adolescents with excess weight, completely abandon the sweet soda for a while. The subjects complained during this period about a headache, a decrease in motivation, a general deterioration in well -being and a severe craving for that same sugar -containing soda. And these are standard symptoms of withdrawal.
Thus, despite the decades of research, scientists could not come to an unambiguous conclusion whether sugar causes a dependence similar to the drug or not. Although in recent years, more and more experiments have confirmed this theory, most of them are carried out on animals, which does not allow us to unequivocally assert that these results are fair for people.
Most likely, the truth
Read on the topic:
- Recommendation for sugar consumption for adults and children (WHO)
- The Guardian: The Sugar Conspiracy
- Nicole Avin. How sugar affects the brain
- Is it true that different zones of the language are responsible for the perception of different tastes?
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