Why do we love sugar?

Continuation. See the beginning at the link.

If we call our relationship with sugar addiction, then any relationship with any food is worthy of the same name: after all, we are drawn to food, damn it, four times a day! Where did such an idea come from? For the first time, the idea of ​​an addictive relationship to food appeared in the mid-80s, against the backdrop of a wave of popularity of Alcoholics Anonymous groups in the United States. It dawned on a certain woman, Judith, that she ate according to the same patterns her husband drank, and she founded the first group of Gluttons Anonymous. The ideology of the group is completely identical to the ideology of AA and AN: it is a 12-step model of abstinence, not from alcohol and drugs, but from sugar, flour and wheat products. Abstinence is based on the idea of ​​one’s own imperfection, the experience of guilt and shame, and the formation of the motivation to “become better”. “Gluttony” is described as an incurable disease that one has to fight all one’s life, every day. A large role in this approach is played by group meetings, the support of other group members. Despite this, even long-term members of Glutton Anonymous admit that they experience “eating breakdowns.”

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What is wrong with the model of food addiction, because it works with alcohol and drugs, you ask? Alcoholics end up not drinking, drug users abstain from drinking. And indeed it is. The 12-step model allows addicts to use alcohol and psychoactive substances to begin to lead a social life, work, try to build relationships. Alcohol and surfactants are not an integral part of life – we can do without them. So far, no one has been able to go without food. Glucose constantly circulates in our blood, if it stops for a minute, we die. But alcohol and cocaine may well circulate somewhere else.

Moreover, if the motivation to “become the best version of yourself” from declassed lumpen who have sunk to the bottom of social life makes quite acceptable members of society, then the same motivation, backed by guilt and shame, in the case of eating disorders leads to the opposite result – attempts obsessive food control, compulsive, exhausting workouts to achieve a “better body”, social isolation, narrowing the circle of interests in low-calorie recipes and new exercises for building cubes. Alcoholics and drug users, recognizing the existence of addiction, are returning to life. People with eating disorders, considering themselves addicted, fall out of it.

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But sugar is indeed a drug, there is scientific evidence! is usually said at this moment. Scientific? Are you sure? Let’s understand further. Judith’s suggestion that food could be addictive not only became the basis of the Glutton Anonymous groups that spread around the world, but also experienced a resurgence in the 2000s, when attempts were made to compare certain foods and psychoactive substances. Of course, the first candidate for the title of addictive was sugar. This is the period when the term “food addiction” begins to sound not only from the lips of journalists and laymen, but also in university audiences.

One of those studies that generated a lot of headlines was a study by a group of neuroscience students at Connecticut College suggesting that foods high in fat or sugar can be as addictive as drugs. The experiment studied the state of the brain of rats that were offered the popular American Oreo cookies at one end of the maze, and rice crackers at the other. How much time the rats spent at one end of the maze and how long at the other was measured, and the results were compared with the behavior in the maze of rats that were injected with cocaine and morphine and, respectively, saline for control. The fact that at the end of the maze where there was a chance to get an Oreo, the rats spent as much time as drug rats spent at the end where they were given the drug, was considered evidence of the existence of an addiction. Another piece of evidence came from measurements of protein expression in the nucleus accumbens (pleasure center). It was the fact that the expression of proteins in rats that ate cookies was several times more intense, which subsequently turned into a sensational statement that sugar is 8 times more addictive than cocaine. The simple and obvious idea that an animal reacts more intensively to high-calorie and tasty food necessary for survival than to a substance that does not affect the survival process in any way did not occur to the students.

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Most touching is the mention by the authors of the fact that rats eat the creamy center of the cookie first, which, from their point of view, indicates the dependent nature of love for cookies. Why it didn’t occur to any of the students that the natural curiosity of rats forced them to look and taste what was inside, like women biting into all the candies in a box of assorted chocolates, I don’t know.

To be sure, Jamie Honohan, the student whose graduate research this paper was, woke up famous. However, this study did not become a scientific sensation – only a journalistic one. Why? In science, it is not customary to take on faith the results of a single qualification, that is, student research. By the way, in all interviews, Connecticut College graduate Jamie Honohan emphasizes that the results need further verification and confirmation by new studies. In addition, there is an obvious and uncomfortable inconsistency with the LCHF nutrition principles: supporters of this system often discuss the addictive nature of sugar, including referring to this very study about rats and cookies, but for some reason they are silent about the “addictive” nature of fat …

Meanwhile, if we talk about the release of endorphins as a result of the work of the dopamine system in response to a stimulus, then a chunk of fatty bacon copes with this task no worse than a bun with sugar icing, and for many people, fatty salty food is significantly more attractive and “addictive” than sweets.

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Moreover, if we consider the activation of the dopamine system as a criterion for addictiveness, we are all very unlucky here. For among the stimuli that cause such a reaction, the first place is occupied, for example, by listening to music. Have you seen with what faces these people in the conservatories are listening to Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto? Already close your eyes! However, listening to classical music is somehow not equated with drug addiction, moreover, the headlines of magazines, the same ones that are full of messages about the horrors of sugar, often and peremptorily state that listening to music is good for health. A hitch!

There is also humor, for example. At a concert of a good comedian or just hearing a good joke, you get a hit of the drug. Refuse. Mothers who recognize their child in a group of children immediately receive a huge dose of dopamine. I remember that the Nazis (people were also very against addictions, by the way) organized Aryan kindergartens, where children produced exclusively from pure Aryans were selected immediately after birth and raised under conditions of the highest hygiene and medical control, so that Aryan mothers would not be distracted by anything there addictive, and Aryan children received the best conditions for development. Thanks to this, the Austrian psychoanalyst René Spitz coined the term “hospitalism”, and the world was convinced that children need to be picked up. Children in the Aryan kindergarten grew up completely mentally retarded and with profound mental disorders. What happened to the mothers, history is silent. They are definitely free from addiction.

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In a word, if you love something or, more than expected, love someone very much, the dopamine system is activated when you do it or see this person. One of the strongest drugs, for example, is to see a loved one smiling and in a good mood. We are all drug addicts. Tie up! All this applied addiction – whether it’s a response to a child’s face, or a reaction to music, humor, smiling faces around, or the opportunity to win a prize – has been formed with us for one single purpose: to ensure the best survival of mankind. Psychoactive substances release such an amount of endorphins that even your smiling child’s performance of your favorite Metallica composition at a school concert under the compere of Mikhail Zhvanetsky cannot be compared. Why are they addictive if they don’t serve survival? The answer is very simple. You have probably heard repeatedly that “the brain is equipped with a complex and developed reward system.” Journalists who have learned the word “dopamine” say it for the red word. The dopamine system is very ancient and primitive. Like a phone Nokia 105 is a unique phone designed to simply call another number. Stimulus is a response. Challenge is the answer. This means that if the task of releasing endorphins is solved, then it does not matter in what way. Our cave ancestors would hardly have been able to do without food for days, in order to eventually find in the Mexican desert, among several corpses with traces of a gunshot, a five-kilogram bag of heroin. They would not be able to replace the required dopamine response with tobacco or artificial sweeteners. For a modern person, the “false-positive” response of the dopamine system to the fact that food is not, and became one of the reasons for the formation of dependence on these substances. And this is a fundamental point: what serves for survival cannot be dangerous and cannot form pathologies. We can only make it pathological ourselves.

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To state the presence of dependence on any substance, three things are needed: cravings, increased tolerance, and withdrawal. All three elements must be present in the dependent behavior at the same time. Craving means an irresistible, strong need for this particular substance or product. Increasing tolerance means that the more you consume this substance, the more you want it. And here is the only point where addictology and sugar-monology intersect: the more sugar you eat, the more you crave sweets. Withdrawal means that in the absence of the right substance, your condition deteriorates rapidly and can be life-threatening. The sugar story lacks signs of physiological cravings and withdrawal, although there is an illusion that there are. In fact, withdrawal is nothing more than hypoglycemia (see Part I), and simply measuring blood sugar levels during all sorts of “detox procedures” proves this convincingly. This is why detox clinics never offer a blood sugar test or the use of a glycometer, but use clients’ poor health as evidence of a sugar addiction.

But back to science. Apart from the student study on rats and Oreos, the most frequently cited is another researchquite respectable. It finds that subjects who score higher on the “food addiction scale” experience more intense stimulation of the brain’s reward system, according to MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) data. Once again, the press responds with enthusiastic headlines: Evidence of food addiction found! They are irrefutable! It’s an MRI!

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In fact, everything this study shows comes down to this. Those people who subjectively note that their reaction to food is more intense actually experience a stronger reaction to food. There is no conclusive evidence for the existence of food addiction or dependence on any one type of product, either in animal studies or in human experiments. However, advocates of the concept of food addiction are not so easy to convince, and the most modern point of view is: well, there is no chemical addiction to food, but there is a behavioral one!

This reminds me of years of marijuana controversy. As soon as they didn’t curse it, it causes psychological dependence, and “paves the way for harder drugs,” but it was not possible to detect obvious harm from its use. Moreover, as the years go by, even the United States, which has always adhered to the policy of the “war on drugs”, is reconciled and allows the medical use of marijuana. Against the background of this heated controversy, people who used marijuana exclusively for years existed and continue to exist without switching to cocaine or heroin. The answer to this phenomenon is more than simple: the use of marijuana significantly and markedly reduces aggression. People massively use marijuana as a substance that allows them to control their own aggression without violating the law and self-mutilation. The key to our complex relationship with sugar lies in much the same area. Sugar is not a drug, nor is fat, it’s just that we use this food to get a quick burst of energy or process emotions that we otherwise find it difficult to deal with. For example, anger. Or sadness. Or boredom. In modern culture, being sad, angry or bored is not very approved – you need to constantly be happy, at the very least – preoccupied with achieving happiness. And these emotions have to go somewhere.

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To date, none of the existing types of food is not recognized as addictive. To conclusively prove the similarity of the brain effects of foods and psychoactive substances, experiments are needed that compare the brain behavior of people who use drugs and certain foods. The ethics of such experiments is a big question, of course, and they will not be carried out soon.

Therefore, the term “eating addiction” is proposed, that is, dependence on the process of eating food, on the state in which we are when we eat, and not on the state in which we find ourselves when we have already eaten. This term takes the discussion to the rails of pure psychology: if we eat to feel better in the process of eating, it’s not about the product we use for this, but that we feel bad. And this is the root of the problem, the problem that must be solved if you feel like “addicted to food.” And it is solved in no way by giving up sugar, but by trying to look at your emotional problems impartially and assess your capabilities, on your own or with the help of a specialist, and solve them.