Would you like to get high... On sugar?

Have you ever seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or read Hansel and Gretel? All is edible, made of sugar and spice, and everything nice (and not in a good way as Power Puff Girls). A gross exaggeration far less than we think; the gastronomical landscape we live in today is not that far from these fairytale-ish wonky worlds of prediabetes. Sugar is everywhere, and added sugar laces over 2/3 of all foods in an average store. It is no wonder that ’most of us are sugar addicts, riding the blood glucose and insulin dragon from dawn to bedtime.

From Cave to Convenience Store

For our hunter and gatherer ancestral line, it was not that easy to find sweet things to amuse their pallets. It was, in fact, bloody difficult, and they would have had to fight bees for honey, wait for those precious few months of fruit abundance to fatten up before winter, or dig around and hope they stumble upon an edible tuber. 

Is sugar a carbohydrate? Sugars and carbohydrates in general. All carbohydrates will break down into some type of sugar as they get metabolized and carbs were rare treats designed for fast fuel and to fatten up before deprivation. How does insulin work? The carb-burning metabolism is designed as a quick burst of energy, and then insulin comes to mop up the excess sugar molecules and put them into storage as fat for later use, stocking up for winter and the upcoming starvation. Occasional sugar consumption is not really the problem. The problem arises when sugar use is chronic and comprises most of our diets. Also, winter never comes nowadays. We’re always feasting and packing but never release what we’ve stored.

We love carbs and are programmed to search for them for these survival purposes. Sugar is also a carb; tableau or granulated sugar (sucrose) is made of half glucose and half fructose. All carbs will eventually break down into glucose and fructose. While all cells of the body can use glucose, fructose can only be processed by the liver, and overconsumption of fructose is linked to NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease), basically packing fat into an overworked small organ and disrupting the hundreds of vital functions that liver performs for the body.
 

Running through the woods as a hunter and doing heavy physical activities all day long as the only available lifestyle made finding something sweet (and therefore high caloric) a jackpot for our ancestors. Still, they burned it off and fasted by necessity when the hunt was a bust and foragers came emptyhanded. Food was not readily available; it was something you worked for, hoping the nutrition reward would be worth the energy spent.

But today, our lifestyle glued our glutei maximi to the chair for hours upon hours a day. We don’t need to break our backs to find morsels of food; we’re comfortable and conveniently fed on every corner. That corner store convenience with its rows of long, long shelf-life products has a catch, and you are probably not even aware of it. There are 262 names for sugar on food labels, and although a healthy digestive system can get rid of a maximum of 4-6 teaspoons of sugar a day, the daily average intake is 22.
 

Over the last half a century, the food industry has slowly, perhaps out of ignorance in the beginning, but deliberately now, turned the whole world population into a gasping bug-eyed sugar slave just looking for their next hit. You will beg to be poisoned, and you will enjoy every step of the way! Sugar is addictive, and refined sugar and its synthetic buddies are toxins, and that is why insulin tries so desperately to get it out of the bloodstream. Insulin function is crucial in the body. It is not a villain here. There is a state when the body is unable to produce and use insulin (diabetes type 1), and before insulin discovery, people were doomed. They didn’t live very long, basically burning their reserves and bodies to death with no possibility of storing the energy they had consumed.

It is quite unfortunate that an utterly opposite problem of having too much insulin due to constant carb overloading is also called diabetes (type 2) and it is quite strange you would force high blood sugars down with more insulin when there is already so much insulin around that the cells have become deaf to the signal (insulin resistance).

What Happened to Our Food?

The demonization of healthy, natural fats as an international nutrition guideline may be considered one of the most criminal swings of the pendulum that led to this moment. In the 80s, the whole world officially got scared of fat as the cause of cardiovascular diseases and increasingly more alarming health crises (when this policy was suggested in the 60’s, everybody and their grandma smoked packs a day, but that was conveniently glanced over).

A wide variety of low-fat this and that hit the shelves, and as a result, we got fatter and sicker. The only way to make something we’ve taken the fat out taste good and therefore make it appealing is to add sugar to it, and lots and lots of it. The process of removing the fiber parallelled the addition of sugar, and we went from 100-300g of fiber per day to about 12g/day on a refined diet. Why do we de-fiber? Because taking the fiber out lengthens the shelf life, the refined food can be cooked faster and frozen longer. Convenient, albeit metabolism and youth-destroying foods. We need fiber. Fiber reduces intestinal carbohydrate absorption rate and insulin response to sugar.

The Sticky Trap of a Sugar Loop

Today, we eat more than a century ago, and most of our food is carbohydrate-based. We weigh approximately 20 pounds more, and our insulin levels are three times higher than they used to be. The higher the insulin, the worse the brain recognizes leptin (satiety hormone), says Dr. Robert H. Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist.

We won’t argue that life has become much more chronically stressful today, enhancing the hormone cortisol secretion, which makes you crave sugar and carbs as your life depends on it because the brain wants a quick mood-altering fix. You overload on sugar and feel better for a little while, like scratching an itchy mosquito bite, but then the pancreas releases insulin to mop up the free sugar and put it safely into storage. High blood sugar crashes and leaves you tired and exhausted, looking for another high, but the insulin, which is still not on the baseline, does not allow you to use the already stored energy, and the cycle starts again. Suddenly, you notice love handles. After a certain number of those sugar binges, the skin seems duller and older (that’s due to a process called glycation), and our midsection is growing as the brain loses the ability to recognize leptin (a hormone that tells your body you’re full), which pushes you even deeper into the oh-so-sweet darkness.

From Healthy to Type 2 Diabetes

Here is a shortcut to understanding how chronic carb overexposure can break a healthy metabolism over time and lead to hyperinsulinemia, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, prediabetes symptoms, and diabetes.

What does insulin do, and why do we need it? Is insulin a hormone, and what organ produces insulin? Yes, insulin is a hormone your pancreas makes, and it is necessary to manage blood glucose, saving the overflow into storage as fat. Carbohydrates raise insulin (proteins raise it a bit, but fats have no effect), and insulin tells the body to store all we can’t readily use. We can’t store and burn at the same time; it would be like pressing the gas and the break simultaneously. While in storing mode with elevated insulin (a normal state after a meal that contains carbs), the body can’t release the already stored fat energy until the meal is processed and the insulin drops.

But what is insulin resistance? If insulin is high all of the time, we just keep packing those fat cells. Frequent meals high in carbs ensure insulin never goes down to baseline and continues to pack more fat into storage because free sugars in the bloodstream are damaging to cells and nerves. Once at the point of bursting, like a water balloon that cannot take anymore, the fat cell refuses to cooperate. Fighting for its life and not wanting to burst, the fat cell decides to ignore the insulin signal and thus becomes insulin resistant. Imagine a tone that never goes away. After a while, you’d just not hear it anymore; your brain would tune it out as irrelevant so you don’t go insane.

Now, if the tone changes, you’ll pay attention again. Similarly, if the constant insulin tone stops for a while, the cells will regain their sensitivity to it. Still, if the sugar overload doesn’t stop even after the cells have become insulin resistant, the body has nowhere to put the excess sugars we keep eating. Eventually, our blood glucose will get high enough to be diagnosed as a prediabetic or type 2 diabetic, and then the spiral of comorbidities and disease truly kicks in. However, years or even decades before noticing the high blood sugar, insulin was already working overtime to try to protect you. Basically, too much of anything will make you lose sensitivity to the over-abundant “thing,” and you’ll need more to get the same effect. This is called “tolerance” in pharmacology and addiction.

So, from having no to very little sugar in our diet, we suddenly switched to eating at least our own body weight in sugar each year in some countries. We cannot be completely sure about our cave-dwelling ancestors, but we know that people in 1700 consumed about 4 pounds (2kg) of sugar in a year. This number grew to 22 pounds (about 10kg) in the next hundred years, only to almost quintuple to 90 pounds (40kg) in the 1900s, leading us to our current position of some countries consuming over 360 pounds per capita (about 165kg).

Is Sugar Addictive?

In a world designed to grab your attention by chemical or pixel, food addictions have never been taken quite as seriously as the more glamorous addictions you can put your finger on and readily publicly repent for. They were dismissed as minor problems and much more a personal flaw or lack of self-control than a true addiction. However, the diseases resulting from a broken metabolism will claim more lives globally than cocaine, heroin, or alcohol ever did. We wouldn’t feed our pet candy all day long, but we’re happy to go through our day on just coffee and sugar.

The body is a furnace with specific needs that are neglected for profit. Refined carbohydrates and sugar act as mood-altering drugs through similar reward mechanisms as other addictive drugs. They enhance serotonin production, which then regulates the release of dopamine and endorphins, the natural feel-good chemicals in our body. We tend to stick to things that make us feel good, even if the damage they cause is way more significant.

Semblaces of food, designed to look pretty on a shelf, create addicts and train you out of free will one delicious bite at a time, overriding normal satiety mechanisms. There are signs to tell you if you’ve got a problem. Maybe you can’t skip dessert because you feel irritated, without energy, extremely nervous, or lethargic, or you crave a glass of wine or a cocktail on a daily basis. You might just hide food and eat when no one is watching, feel shame as you do, or you can’t think properly without your sugar rush. Are you always sleepy and exhausted, even though you get enough rest? Are you prone to migraines or frequent yeast infections? If you’ve had a few yeses, start paying attention.

This is the state known as diabesity, the stage before the onset of type 2 diabetes. As we've explained above, it means that your body needs to produce so much insulin to deal with the enormous amounts of sugar that the cells start to go numb to it, creating insulin resistance.
 

Different Types of Sugar

Not all sugars are made the same.

Glucose is not that sweet; fructose is sweeter, but a sugar supplement saccharine is 300 times sweeter than table sugar. Natural sugar is obtained from sugar beets or sugar cane, yet once refined, it is precisely the same and is called table sugar (sucrose). Refining eliminates all the other nutrients and destroys 64 beneficial compounds to get the pure, infinitely stable white crystals. 

Stevia is a sugar supplement extracted from the leaves of the Stevia rebaudiana plant. It is calorie-free and doesn’t raise your blood sugar levels. 

Saccharine gained popularity during WWI and was branded Sweet-and-Low in the mid-20th century. There was an attempt to ban it in 1977 by the FDA, but due to Congress's intervention, food only had to be labeled as containing it. In 2000, even the label was revoked. 

Aspartame is a sugar that’s been a center of debate in the last couple of decades due to it being linked to certain types of cancer, but it is still used as a common additive in our food. 

Sucralose is a variation of common sugar, but it has some chlorine particles and can, therefore, not be metabolized. It is used as an additive in baking due to its ability to withstand high temperatures.

We’re very proud of ourselves on days when we use sugar that has no caloric value, but this may actually be confusing to your metabolism. Persistent use of artificial sweeteners plays a trick on your brain, which associates the sweet sensation on the tongue with high caloric value, but overloading on artificial non-caloric sugars makes that never deliver what the sweetness promises, may make the brain struggle to discern the hunger and fullness signals and tell when the body has had enough. This is the ideal jump-off point for overeating, as the body doesn’t really recognize artificial sugars.
 

Our bodies had never experienced high fructose corn syrup before its discovery in 1966 in Japan. And now, most of the items that sport a barcode on their side are laced with high fructose corn syrup. It is more obviously present in soft drinks, which also contain caffeine and salt to dehydrate you, and the large amounts of sugar are often there to mask the salt. The more dehydrated you get, the more you’ll crave another drink and the more products you will buy, so it’s not just addiction at play.

But when it comes to addictive aspects of food, just like other addictions, biochemistry will govern behavior until the stimulus is removed and the system can return to balance, and there are more important issues to deal with when it comes to sugar than fitting in your skinny jeans.

Conclusion

Eat less frequently with meals composed of real food that comes to you in its original form. There are no barcodes unless you’ve read the ingredients and understand them. Eat quality protein like meat, cheese, cottage cheese, eggs with fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, seeds, and nuts like sunflower, sesame, poppy, or pumpkin seeds and legumes. Whole grains are barely better than refined ones, so get your carbs mainly through veggies; tubers are excellent.  

Don’t stuff or starve yourself. Starving will only lead to cravings to fill your body with junk, and it will slow down your natural metabolism because the body you’re not feeding will believe it is time to start conserving energy and saving up for later. It will continue to do so as you stop your crash diet, often making you gain more than you’ve lost. This is the mechanism behind the yo-yo effect of restrictive diets.

Sugar has nothing else to offer except sweetness, and carbohydrates are not essential to the body like fats and proteins are. Void of nutrients, sugar forces the body to deplete its own vitamins, minerals, and enzymes, leading to the rise of acidity in the body, a “sweet spot” for the pathogens and disease to thrive. So the next time you feel that doughnut calling you, just stop and think. Do you really want your life to be controlled by the interests of profiteers and by a broken gut flora? Will you sacrifice your health for a few seconds ride on a sugar rollercoaster? 

 

Maybe it’s time to entertain the idea of a sugar detox. Every decision matters, and it will become a habit. Habits will translate into a life-supporting or life-threatening lifestyle. We hope we’ve helped you make some more informed choices and that you’ve learned something today.  Choices matter, and the future matters. Stay curious, stay beautiful, stay sweet, and enjoy living in your skin.