Sugar takes your brain to the addictive Joyride and makes it harder to resist. This excerpt from Julie Danilck’s new book “Becoming Sugar Free: How to Break Up with Inflammatory Sugar and Accept a Naturally Sweet Life” explains exactly what happens when you eat a chocolate lava cake.
Why do you like sugar?
Children don’t taste salt until the age of four months, but the taste of our sweets happens the moment we are born. Sugar has been found to be a type of temporary painkiller. According to a 2005 survey, children can keep their hands in cold water for longer if they have sweets in their mouths.
Because sugar is so attractive, scientists recently revealed through brain scans that eating sugar brightens the brain as it does when taking powerful medicines such as cocaine. Many psychoactive substances, including oxycontin, ecstasy, heroin, alcohol, and marijuana, overactivate the dopamine reward system. Our main reward hormone, dopamine, tells us something like “great job, try again, you are successful, you are great”. It’s released when you have fun, such as gathering with friends, winning awards, or succeeding at work. It is also released when sugar is consumed.
To make matters worse, dopamine receptors can become insensitive to the presence of dopamine when continuously induced. If you constantly spike dopamine, you need to take more and more extreme actions to get the same “reward” as previously triggered less extreme actions. In other words, your brain is resistant to dopamine hits and produces increasingly extreme behaviors. Dopamine is a major hormone involved in addiction, so you can see how dopamine works in the background of sugar addiction, whether you are aware of it or not.
Every time you eat a sweet treat, you get part of the dopamine reaction, but you need to eat more sugar to feel the same rush over time. Sugar elicits the greatest dopaminergic response of any food on the planet. This is attractive when compared to other particularly enjoyable food reactions that we do not have the opportunity to draw attention to. Hope the broccoli produces the same reward response, but compared to the reaction evoked by refined sugar, your reward center is simply tired of healthy foods. Sugar is addictive because you never get tired of rewards, and as the rewards decrease with each hit, we chase after it more and more.
Let’s take a look at that bite of chocolate lava cake again. I’m very happy that your reward center is screaming. “Yes, that’s a great idea! Do it again!” When we’re doing other fun things, we often enjoy treats like this. For example, on birthdays, we usually interact with friends and take other fun substances that consume large amounts of dopamine, such as alcohol and caffeine.
There is an old saying in neuroscience. “Neurons that fire together are wired together.” This means that the more often a neural circuit is executed in the brain, the stronger the relationship between the circuits. If you keep chasing dopamine with sugar and combining that behavior with other fun, this stack of multiple rewards that feels good at the moment can have long-term health implications. This chapter describes how to create a new behavior for stacking health cards to your advantage. When learning a healthy way to stimulate dopamine, you no longer need refined sugar or flour.
Excerpt from Julie Danilck’s “Becoming Sugar Free: How to Break Up with Inflammatory Sugar and Accept a Naturally Sweet Life”. © 2021 Julie Daniluk Consulting Inc. Photo © 2021 With Alan Smith, Julie Daniluk, Bethany Bierema, Nat Caron. Published by Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by agreement with the publisher. all rights reserved.
Nutritionist and television personality Julie Daniluk is an award-winning best-selling author of three books, including “Inflammation-Relieving Diet” and “Hot Detox.” Her fourth book, Becoming Sugar-Free, was released by Penguin / Random House in September 2021. Julie is celebrating her 11th season as a nutrition expert at the Marilyn Dennis Show. For more information, please visit JulieDaniluk.com, Facebook, and Instagram@juliedaniluk.
This article was first published in Radiant Life Magazine.
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