Sweet Suicide: Sugar Deadlier than Drugs and Just as Addictive

Is sugar the biggest modern-day scourge of the earth? Is it a soft kill slow suicide?

It used to be thought that our bodies could evolve and adapt with the extra poundage of sugar consumed each year. But come 150lbs yearly on average consumed by each person - I think we've proven that theory false.

It's been said that 1-2 teaspoons of sugar in various forms can change your entire physiology in just seconds. Mood swings can come from the sugar but probably mainly from the intense insulin spikes and dips. The first part of this video shows an almost cruel experiment on children's reactions to eating sugar cubes - later it talks about opioid effects, like drug withdrawals in rats including chattering teeth, high pitched crying, shakes, anxiety and brain chemistry changes.



Sugar consumption is implicated in chronic inflammation, chronic fatigue, immune suppression, feeding cancer, heart disease, and obesity - yeah, I would say that's pretty deadly! From one pre-diabetic sugar-addict to another, here are some resources:

Many people recommend Sugar Blues by William Duffy. It's a riveting true story about a man whose entire life changed after meeting actress Gloria Swanson who told him sugar was poison. He researched and found out why. He weaves the history of sugar throughout in this classic little paperback. It's one of those books that without disgusting the reader, motivates a person to really think about their next bite.

Having a hard time quitting cold turkey? Me too. Just like with tobacco, cravings are often exacerbated by malnutrition and deficiencies. Leaving a vacuum by quitting is a sure way to dive back in. ALSO - since Candida Yeast uses sugar as food, the cravings might actually be coming from the yeast. Starving Candida and the cravings becomes more difficult. Ease yourself in and add the nutrition with Dr. Joel Fuhrman's Eat for Health series of two books, one for diet and recipes, the other to gear up the mind. They are so gentle.

If you're ever at a garage sale or old book shop, look for The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet by Doctors Rachael and Richard Heller. They were both obese, tired and riddled with cravings when they discovered that if they just push carbs into dinner time only, within a 60-minute period, they could reset the whacked-out insulin cycle. The way they described the theory was that a certain set of people - carb addicts - have a leaky insulin valve that starts running the second a simple carb is eaten. They used the method to lose all the weight, cut cravings and fix mood swings - and to help people who weren't making progress in Overeaters Anonymous (OA).

Please, please ignore the parts and recipes that promote using artificial sweeteners - those are neurotoxins and there are natural alternatives available that won't spike insulin.

The video goes into marketing tactics - while compelling, I think the real trouble comes from the cravings, Candida, difficulty withdrawing, and the grotesque, vast prevalence in grocery store foods. Until cravings and diabetic tendency is corrected, it's best to avoid fruit, honey and grains, especially if these trigger reactions.

Many naturopaths can help to stave off or reverse diabetes, eradicate Candida, and curb cravings - it's best to do research, ask questions and find one in your area. A host of issues begin in the gut - be good to it. The naturopath can help with that too.

Waking Times
Sugar and artificial sweeteners are so accessible, affordable and socially sanctioned, that few consider their habitual consumption to be a problem on the scale of say, addiction to cocaine.  But if recent research is correct their addictive potential could be even worse.

Almost 40 years ago, William Duffy published a book called Sugar Blues which argued that refined sugar is an addictive drug and profoundly damaging to health.  While over 1.6 million copies have been printed since its release in 1975, a common criticism of the book has been that it lacked sufficient scientific support.

Today, William Duffy’s work is finding increasing support in the first-hand, peer-reviewed and published scientific literature itself. Not only is sugar drug-like in effect, but it may be more addictive than cocaine.  Worse, many sugar-free synthetic sweeteners carry with them addictive properties and toxicities that are equal to, or may outweigh those of sugar.
Back in 2007, a revealing study titled, “Intense sweetness surpasses cocaine reward,”  found that when rats were given the option of choosing between water sweetened with saccharin and intravenous cocaine, the large majority of animals (94%) preferred the sweet taste of saccharin.[i]

This preference for sweetness was not attributable to its unnatural ability to induce sweetness without calories, because the same preference was found with sucrose; nor was the preference for saccharin overcome by increasing doses of cocaine.

A common argument against the relevance of animal studies like this to human behavior is that rats differ too profoundly from humans. However, even insects like forager bees have been found to respond in a similar way to humans when given cocaine, experiencing an overestimation of the value of the floral resources they collected, with cessation of chronic cocaine treatment causing a withdrawal-like response.[ii]

Researchers believe that intense sweetness activates ancient neuroendocrine pathways within the human body, making obsessive consumption and/or craving inevitable. The authors of the cocaine/saccharin study summarized this connection as follows:

Our findings clearly demonstrate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and -addicted individuals. We speculate that the addictive potential of intense sweetness results from an inborn hypersensitivity to sweet tastants. In most mammals, including rats and humans, sweet receptors evolved in ancestral environments poor in sugars and are thus not adapted to high concentrations of sweet tastants.

The supranormal stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets, such as those now widely available in modern societies, would generate a supranormal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus to lead to addiction.

In a previous article, “Is Fructose As Addictive As Alcohol?”, we looked at the addictive properties of isolated fructose in greater depth, including over 70 adverse health effects associated with fructose consumption.

 It appears that not only does fructose activate a dopamine- and opioid-mediated hedonic pathway within the body, but like excessive alcohol consumption, exacts a significant toll on health in exchange for the pleasure it generates.

The drug-like properties of common beverages and foods, have been the subject of a good deal of research over the past few decades. Wheat and related grains, for instance, are a major foodsource of opioid peptides. These pharmacologically active compounds, also found in milk,coffee and even lettuce, may even explain why ancient hunters and gatherers took the agrarian leap over 10,000 years ago.

  Likely, the transition from the Paleolithic to Neolithic was motivated by a combination of environmental pressures and the inherently addictive properties made accessible and abundant due to the agrarian/animal husbandry mode of civilization. For more on this, read our essay “The Dark Side of Wheat.”

As far as synthetic sweeteners, an accumulating body of toxicological research indicates they have a wide range of unintended, adverse health effects beyond the aforementioned problem of addiction. For a comprehensive list, view our Artificial Sweetener Research page.

One clear implication of these findings is that one is best served consuming natural sweet foods, including honey, or fruit like apples. Not only are these easier to consume in moderation, but they have a profound set of “side benefits” as well.