A new crisis is threatening the prosperity of our great nation! This valuable white powder is being imported by the tons to satisfy the cravings of millions of deliciously delinquent addicts! And the most frightening part? It's now being pushed on our children. Doctors say this little girl might never come down from her Sugar High!
Why do our brains love sugar so much? Even when we know it can be so bad for us?
Chemically speaking, sugar is a broad term, a whole group of generally sweet tasting carbohydrates, basically anything on the ingredient label ending in that. Sugar is a confusing part of our diet, because it isn't all bad. Your brain consumes a fifth of your daily calories, and it pretty much only wants those calories in the form of glucose. So it's no surprise that our brains reward us when we eat sugar. When we take a bite of food, certain molecules activate receptors spread all over our tongue. Taste buds evolved to pick out flavors that were important to our ancestor's survival. Bitter flavors could signal poisonous foods. Sour might signal unripe or spoiled foods that could make us sick. Sweet tastes told our ancestors they had found a quick, easy energy source. Those taste buds send signals to the brain, activating networks that help us learn whether we like what we're eating or if we should try it again. And sugar is a flavor we're born to crave. This all worked fine when sugar was hard to , but today, sugar is everywhere we look.
The sugarcane plant was first domesticated around 8000 BC. People would chew on leaves for a sweet treat. By 327 BC, one of Alexander the Great's generals spoke of "a reed in India that brings forth honey without the help of bees." But crystalline sugar remained rare until around 500 AD. Arab traders used technology to make sugar on a large scale, and during the Muslim conquest of the Mediterranean, sugar followed wherever their armies went. But despite hundreds of years of trading, "sweet salt" was still a rare and expensive luxury. Until a guy named Christopher Columbus brought sugarcane to the New World. Over the next few centuries, millions of African and Native American slaves were put to work making sugar, which got turned into rum, which got turned into money, which funded more slave trade, which produced more sugar.
When Europeans realized sugar made other imports like coffee, tea, and chocolate actually taste good, suddenly people were adding sugar to everything. Between 1700 and 1900 the average person in England went from consuming 4 pounds of sugar a year to nearly 100 pounds annually. I'm not saying our evolutionary sweet tooth molded most of Western world history, but I'm not NOT saying that either. Today we find sugar in obvious places, even in natural foods like milk and fruit, but it also sneaks into foods you wouldn't expect, like tomato sauce, yogurt, crackers, salad dressing, and peanut butter, we even put sugar on our, Headache candies. Nutrition experts say it's best to only add about 25 grams of sugar a day to our diet, which is a lot less than you think. Yet the average American eat more than 3 times the recommended amount, translating to about 66 pounds of added sugar every year.
Even though we're not aware we're eating that hidden sugar, our taste buds tell our brain it's there, and that gets us into trouble. Our brain is wired with a complex reward system whose purpose is basically to tell us whether we should do something again. Pleasurable experiences flush certain parts of our brain with dopamine, a neurotransmitter. That reward signal is tied to other circuits that control memory, so we associate liking something with wanting it, we learn to seek out those pleasurable experiences again. "Another one. Another one. And another one. Another one. And another one." Drugs and alcohol cause huge explosions of dopamine that overload our reward system, creating cravings that some people have trouble controlling. That's addiction. Sugar causes similar but smaller dopamine explosions, and that's why some people have trouble saying no to sweet stuff.
Imagine you ate the same meal every day for a month: a delicious, fresh salad, and a cookie. The first day, your brain might give you a similar yummy dopamine reward for both courses. But our brains crave variety, after weeks of eating the same salad, our brain will get bored and our dopamine reward will fade. Foods don't get boring, our brain keeps pumping out that dopamine kick with each bite.
This is why some scientists are asking if sugar should be treated like a drug. When the Wall Street Journal asked Americans to rank dangerous substances, sugar beat out marijuana. And just like the tobacco industry, Harvard scientists in the 1960s were paid by sugar manufacturers to shift the blame for heart disease to people eating too much fat. Sugar kicks off chain reactions in our brain that make us feel good, but if we love it too much, we can forget how to say no. Nobody wants to make donuts a controlled substance, but just keep in mind a little self control can feel pretty good too.
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