Sugar works on the brain in a similar way to drugs. Should its sale therefore be prohibited?
The sale of sweetened carbonated drinks to minors should be banned. And for adults, the hours of sale should be significantly reduced. The tax on these drinks should be increased immediately so that their price is at least doubled. The sale of candy bars and all kinds of sweets in schools should be penalized – recently suggested the famous American pediatrician and specialist in the fight against obesity, professor Robert Lustig from the University of California in San Francisco. “The health risk caused by excessive sugar consumption is so great that it justifies the introduction of regulations similar to those adopted for alcohol or nicotine,” he wrote in the prestigious scientific weekly “Nature”. Anyway, Lustig has long argued that sugar affects the brain in a similar way to the most addictive substances – cocaine or heroin.
At first glance, Lustig’s theses seem completely absurd. It has not been heard of gourmands who raid grocery stores with weapons in their hands to loot candy bars. Not about chocolate junkieswho buy their bodies to get cash to buy their favorite treat. The degree of addiction is completely different – you like sweets, you cannot live without a hard drug, because neither our psyche nor our body can bear it. And yet…
Serge Ahmed of the Institut Fédératif de Recherche sur les Neurosciences in Bordeaux, one of the world’s leading experts in drug addiction, conducted an experiment in 2007 in which he compared the effects of cocaine and sugar on rats. It turned out that 94 percent. of the tested animals chose sweetened water, and only 6 percent. drug. Even rats that had been given cocaine before and could become addicted to it overwhelmingly chose sugar over drugs. Heroin experiments have ended with almost identical results.
Better than a drug
A slightly different experiment was conducted by Bart Hoebel, a professor of psychology at Princeton University. The rats had access to two dispensers – sweetened water and cocaine. Initially, they had to press the lever once to get the desired substance. If they chose sugar or cocaine again, they had to press 2 times, then 4, then 7, then 10. And so on … No matter how hard they had to work, the cocaine lever was pressed twice. and the one from sugar, even several dozen – 85 percent animals have always preferred sugar. Even when the solution was thinned to such an extent that the sweet taste was barely perceptible in the water (without messing about with the cocaine that was still potent). It didn’t change anything – sugar won.
When rats, accustomed to sizable doses of sugar for several weeks, were deprived of sugar, they became visibly irritated; they could not perform the simplest tasks, they suffered palpitations. They had exactly the same symptoms as a drug addict who was taken away. The sugar addiction did not go away even after a very long time. In 2010, an experiment was carried out on mice, this time in Milan. He showed that the animals were ready endure even very painful electroshock, if the prize was a serving of chocolate.
Of course, rats or mice aren’t humans. It cannot be assumed on the basis of a rodent experiment that we would have done the same (but we are different in more than just the absence of a tail). Perhaps the experiences comparing the attractiveness of hard drugs and sugar are not the same as we think. Perhaps some rats are particularly susceptible to cocaine, in the same way that some people are erotic or gambling lovers, but most choose wisely in their caloric sugar.
The whole thing could also be summarized differently and say that we live in a time addicted to the very concept of addiction – anything that brings us pleasure is presented as a symptom of harmful addiction, whether it is work, internet or food. So why not create a new category – diabetics. The most innocent of all …
Unfortunately, this is not entirely true. Sugar has become so trivial in our eyes that we do not see what it really is. And it resembles a Kalashnikov in a way, which is cheap, easy to produce and easy to use (even children use it efficiently) and that is why it contributed to the death of so many people.
Ubiquitous and cheap
For most of human history, sugar has been scarce and scarce. Only in 1979 (!), For the first time in history, a sufficient quantity of it was produced in the world. Before, its price was dizzying. In the 3th century, a head of sugar (varying sizes, depending on the manufacturer, from 30 to XNUMX pounds) was worth its weight in silver. Until Europeans built the first refineries in overseas colonies in the XNUMXth century, sugar was one of the main means of payment. As Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat writes in The Natural and Moral History of Food: “Although the age of sugar as a measure of value lasted only two hundred years, millions of lives were sacrificed to him. Much more than gold. And certainly in a much more spectacular way. “
At the beginning of the 5th century, the average sugar consumption in Europe was 42 kg per person per year. Today, a Pole eats around 39 kilograms a year (the EU average is around XNUMX kg). So-called added sugars (i.e. mono- and disaccharides, e.g. glucose and fructose, sucrose) are present in almost all products. Our body is used to sugar and craves it more and more.
Sugar is ubiquitous as its price drops. In the 70s, the US began to massively replace beet sugar with the so-called HFCS (high fructose corn syrup), sweeter and twice as cheap, but equally deadly for health. The era of sweet breads, pizzas, hamburgers, salads, ketchups and meat sauces has begun. The so-called conspiracy of producers of carbonated drinks. These drinks contain a lot of salt to increase thirst (and laxatives, diuretics, so there is room for another can). The taste of salt can only be hidden with a gigantic dose of sugar. As a result, the American consumes an average of 425 calories more than 30 years ago, and the United States is the fattest country in the world with the highest percentage of obese people. Only that Poland has an increasing chance of becoming number one. The rate of obesity growth in Poland is 10 times higher than in the USA. And it mainly affects children (the fattest live in Warsaw).
The number of obese people in the world today is one third higher than the number of malnourished people. At the same time, “diet” has become one of the most frequently used words, even ways of life (who has not been, is not or is not going to be on a diet?). How to understand this paradox?
Contrary to appearances, it is very easy. First, our body has not yet adapted to the changes in the environment. For most of the history of our species, humans have lived in a world where food has been constantly scarce, and that is why today we pounce on food with such enthusiasm, even though we do not lack it anymore. Second, when saturated fats were understood in the 70s, people were forced to eliminate them from the menu. It did work – the percentage of fats in the American or European diets dropped by 30 to 40 percent. On the other hand, the consumption of sugar in all possible forms has increased significantly. Hence the need to constantly be on a diet.
It’s not everything. For a long time our approach to nutrition was based on the simple premise that what matters most is the caloric value of food. It is known: if you do not want to gain weight, you should burn as many calories as you have introduced into your body. Every 7 calories that we have not been able to burn means we will weigh a kilogram more.
When is it time for coffee and cake? – read more on MedTvoiLokony
Tax in gourmands
Robert Lustig’s theories contradict this widely accepted belief. In his opinion: “It’s not about how many calories the sugar contains. It is not the caloric content that is the main problem. It is based on the fact that sugar is a poison by itself. ” It’s about the way our body absorbs it. While, for example, glucose (from bread, potatoes, etc.) is metabolized in every cell of our body, sugar is mainly processed in the liver (similar to alcohol, i.e. fermented sugar). It puts too much strain on the liver, which can make it fat (similar to alcoholism). Since most of the calories are burned in the liver, the body does not get the proper signal. He does not notice that he has been fed. Our brain demands another dose of food. In short, sugar makes us eat more and more.
Some countries have recently introduced taxes on unhealthy food: Denmark and Hungary on saturated fat, France on sweet sodas. These steps were taken because, for the first time in human history, chronic diseases (cardiovascular, diabetes, cancer) pose a greater risk than infectious diseases. Already today, 336 million diabetics live on Earth, in 2030 their number will exceed half a billion. Metabolic disorders related to lack of exercise and a poor diet, too high in fats and sugars, contribute to diseases that kill 35 million people every year. This is especially true for poor countries and, in Europe, for people with the lowest incomes. – Sugar does not wreak such rapid havoc in our body as alcohol. But it wreaks much more havoc around the world, ‘says Robert Lustig.
When taxes on nicotine were drastically increased and smoking banned in public places, no one was sure what this would bring. Today, in developed countries, about 20 percent smoke. adults, while in the mid-twentieth century there were about 50% of them. Almost no one doubts that it paid off. Obesity, like smoking, is a social epidemic. When smokers are out of our sight, we are much more likely to give up the addiction. American researchers Nicholas Christakis, professor of medicine and social sciences at Harvard, and James Fowler, professor of social sciences and genetics at the University of California, San Diego, found that having an obese friend increases the risk of obesity by 57 percent. Even the fact that we have someone among our friends who knows someone fluffy increases the risk.
Of course, it’s easier to fight drugs, nicotine or alcohol than sugar – not everyone uses drugs while everyone eats sugar. We are not offended when someone gets a high sentence for cocaine trafficking. However, if they were put in prison for chocolates, we would consider this reality to be the worst possible (I would have received multiple life sentences myself). Not only because we like chocolates, but most of all because we value freedom. There is no doubt that Lustig went too far in his proposals. The world where you have to be 18 to buy a can of sweet soda will never come. But the killer effects of overusing sugar need to be limited somehow.
Text: Maciej Nowicki
Also read: The grave sins of light products