Do you have a sweet tooth?
And find sugar cravings hard to resist?
Well, there’s a very good reason for that.
Sugar is more rewarding than cocaine.
Cocaine or sweetened water?
These were the menu options presented to a sample of research rats1.
They had the option of pressing lever C to receive an intravenous dose of cocaine or lever S for a 20-second guzzle of sweetened water.
You’d have to think they’d go for the cocaine. Surely a bigger kick and without any stigma among rats.
Turns out you’d be wrong. A whopping 94% of them went for the water. Not even a higher dose of cocaine, intoxication with cocaine or sensitisation to cocaine swayed them in that direction.
Sweetened water was clearly their drug of choice.
But why?
The first logical explanation comes down to energy.
Cocaine is an empty high that delivers no actual benefit to our body’s health and survival. Whereas sweet foods and drinks carry energy, which is a fundamental biological need.
Yet the same results applied when that water was artificially sweetened with saccharin, which contains no energy.
This brings us to sugar hypersensitivity.
Our taste receptors were formed way back in time when our diet consisted of whatever we could rustle up from our surrounding natural environment. A few berries were as sweet as things got. This meant our taste receptors were accustomed to very little sweetness.
While our taste receptors remain the same, our surrounding environment has not. We can now rustle up copious quantities of sweetness in our not-so-natural surrounding environment. And this means our taste receptors are overstimulated by each hit of sugar.
Then comes addiction.
Excessive sweetness triggers a spike in our brain’s reward centre. And this just kicks of a vicious cycle in which we’re motivated toward consuming more sugar. Which of course, is easily accomplished.
Kick the addiction.
Awareness of this not-so-sweet side of sweet foods and drinks is a good start.
There’s so much more to consuming something sweet than momentary pleasure. It’s not an isolated and short-lived sugar hit. It’s a reinforcement and escalation of a genuine biological addiction.
With this in mind, we can take action to change our diet and ease any addiction.
Some of us like to take the cold-turkey route and go about avoiding every skerrick of sweetness. Whilst that’s fine in theory, it’s not so easy in practice. It’s also not necessary. There’s nothing wrong with a little sweetness in our lives.
As with all things health, it’s about moderation. We just be mindful about keeping our intake of both natural and artificial sugars in check.
By simply reducing our consumption of sweet foods and drinks, we weaken that addictive cycle because we’re reducing the hyperstimulation of our taste receptors and reward centre.
For Mor check out Understanding free radicals and antioxidants | MorHealth
