Food Politics

Just anecdotally, when I stopped eating simple sugars I stopped having symptoms of hypoglycemia. I can now feel hungry without feeling desperate or irritable or dizzy. I used to HAVE to eat when I was hungry, now I can wait. I made the switch on the recommendation of a reproductive psychiatrist, to help with my severe PMS. As a dietitian I know that I didn’t have a very high sugar intake so I didn’t think it would make a difference. It definitely did. My life is much easier to manage.

It may not be an addiction, but it was a revelation. The first couple weeks it was extremely difficult, but became easier — either that was the normal bad habit breaking and good habit establishment discomfort, or a kind of “withdrawal”, or a combination.

Or maybe an “addiction” theory is hard to tease out in populations, if it is only estrogen-sensitive people who are vulnerable.

I try to keep my simple sugars below 4 grams in any food/drink. If I eat fruit I combine it with nuts or cheese. For treats I eat ice cream with splenda, candies with sorbitol, or chocolate with 80%+ cocoa solids. It is only rarely a nuisance now that I’m used to it. My diet is higher in fat now, but my LDL cholesterol is lower and my HDL is higher.

I have the same experience as Cathy, without the PMS.

Looks like the Journal of Nutrition has a supplement examining this issue. The full-text will be freely available in PubMed Central starting Mar 1 2010.

J Nutr. 2009 Mar;139(3):617-9. Epub 2009 Jan 28.
Symposium overview–Food addiction: fact or fiction?
Corwin RL, Grigson PS.

The Pennsylvania State University, Nutritional Sciences Department, University Park, PA 16802, USA. rxc13@psu.edu

Food addiction is a pervasive, yet controversial, topic that has gained recent attention in both lay media and the scientific literature. The goal of this series of articles is to use a combination of preclinical and clinical data to
determine whether foods, like drugs of abuse, can be addictive, the conditions under which the addiction develops, and the underlying neurophysiological substrates. Operational definitions of addiction that have been used in the treatment of human disorders and to guide research in both humans and animals are presented, and an overview of the symposium articles is provided. We propose that
specific foods, especially those that are rich in fat and/or sugar, are capable of promoting “addiction”-like behavior and neuronal change under certain conditions. That is, these foods, although highly palatable, are not addictive
per se but become so following a restriction/binge pattern of consumption. Such consummatory patterns have been associated with increased risk for comorbid conditions such as obesity, early weight gain, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse as well as with relapse and treatment challenges. The topic of food addiction bears study, therefore, to develop fresh approaches to clinical
intervention and to advance our understanding of basic mechanisms involved in loss of control.
PMCID: PMC2714380 [Available on 2010/3/1]
PMID: 19176750 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Anecdotally – when I eat a lot of sweets (during the holidays, etc.), I crave them more. After a bout of too many sweets I give myself a break from them — go a few weeks without having any desserts — and then I go back to my normal state, which is enjoying the occasional sweet without craving them all the time. The more I have them, the more I want them.

I vote for nonaddictive, and I don’t think that sugar is amphetamines for children either.

Highly desirable taste sensation? Sure I’d agree with that. For the record, I think crunchy is too.

“when I stopped eating simple sugars”

So you stopped eating? Simple sugars (monosaccarides) are fructose, glucose, galactose, xylose, and ribose. All of which are … well, pretty much anywhere. They’re also essential to our survival, and – in the case of xylose, for example – are basic building blocks for so essential things as heparan sulfate.

Disaccarides, such as sucrose (table sugar) contain simple sugars, so do polysaccharides like starch or cellulose. Take out one H2O and you have a simple sugar, again. Which is, incidentally, how starches are broken down into maltodextrose, maltose, and glucose in order. And how said glucose then is converted into fructose for high fructose corn syrup.

I believe you meant cutting out sugar additives and refined additives? Adding sucrose to pretty much anything (or fructose lately) is surely a problem. Not one that has to do with simple sugars but with over-indulgence on additive sweeteners. Without simple sugars there would be no life, simple as that.

I apologize if this comes across as proselytizing or nitpicking, but the biggest issue we have these days in discussing food, food politics, and healthy eating, is the intentional muddling of terms and science. It serves the alarmists, the haters, and the food industry immensely while hurting us, the consumer.

About 5 years ago, I quit drinking cola (a 3 liter a day habit). I have never in my life been a sweets person, but when all that sugar left my system I began pathologically hunting down any sugar I could find. It was pretty terrifying, actually.
I’m not an expert on the subject of addiction, but that was an experience that I would call “close enough.”

When I cut out processed foods, though, I didn’t have a similar reaction to salt. Instead, my tastebuds re-acclimated, so the same foods now taste EXTREMELY salty.

I think there is a load of semantic baggage with the term “addiction.” Problematic, IMO.

That said, I wonder what you thought of the issues David Kessler raised in The End of Overeating? Also, I’ve been waiting to get more than the press blurbs, but I thought the research that they were doing at Scripps was somewhat compelling as well:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48605/title/Junk_food_turns_rats_into_addicts

I go with Beth in The End Of Overeating. He was pretty clear about studies on what he termed “hyper-palatable” foods like Ensure being as addictive as crack cocaine.

Oops. Should have included these links in my previous comment:

http://www.radiantrecovery.com/newsensitive6.htm

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/11/06/0908789106.abstract

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2008/12/10/sugar.html

Since they can’t really decide on what “addiction” means for the DSM-V, I won’t be surprised that the concept of addiction and food is problematic. But I do think there is some real evidence that there’s more to the story.

And as Michael Pollan points out in rule 2 of Food Rules, the industrial food system sure seems to have figured out how to get us to buy more and eat more of their high-sugar, high-fat, high-sodium products!

Jonas — I didn’t stop eating refined additives — your attempt to clarify doesn’t work. And I didn’t try to stop having simple sugars in my blood stream, just in what I consumed.

Apologies for not writing everthing perfectly — it’s a blog comment, not a scientific paper

How about: “I started avoiding consumption of, as much as possible and reasonable, foods and beverages containing simple sugars in amounts more than 4 gms per portion.” Hope that’s better.

This topic makes me crazy. Why are people so invested in proving that sugar isn’t addictive? And what does ‘addictive’ even mean, anyway? Physical withdrawal symptoms? What about behavioral symptoms? So much of it feels like semantics.

I have a threshold for how much sugar I can consume in a day: No refined carbs, no more than 4 servings of fruit, no dried fruit. If I stay within these guidelines, my eating is perfectly manageable. I have no cravings, I have no mood swings, I respect feelings of satiety.

When I don’t follow those rules, I spend a few days miserable (or spend weeks on the roller-coaster). I obsess about food, I eat long past the point of feeling full, I crave sugar (in any form) constantly.

Am I addicted? I don’t know what that word means. Do I feel out of control? Do I experience dramatic mood swings? Will I go out after midnight in search of something sweet? Yes to all of that. If I stay away from refined sugars long enough, do those feelings pass? Yes.

We seem to have no problems reconciling that many people can drink recreationally (and in far greater quantities than other people) without ever becoming addicted, yet others are an alcoholic after their first drink. Why is it so hard to accept that most people have no problems with sugar, but some people are absolutely ‘addicted’ to it in the sense that their lives become unmanageable without it?

My older son manages sugar just fine. Yet when we removed all added sugar from my younger son’s diet, on day three he experienced a withdrawal that was comparable to any drug addict’s. His doctor wouldn’t acknowledge this until he saw some video footage that my husband shot. Now he’s a believer.

Refined carbs — and even dried fruit — have no place in my life. There is no ‘just one’ for me, any more than the recovering alcoholic can have just one drink. I’m sure that’s not true for most people, but it’s unquestionably my reality. Label that any way you’d like.

What about this study by Penn State researchers showing that you need to consume more and more sugar to reach the same threshold of craving satisfaction?

http://live.psu.edu/story/36294

To me, that spells addiction.

Wolfram Schultz at Cambridge University carried out studies on Temporal Differences of rewards given to monkey’s to measure dopamine levels and predictive outcomes. The research pointed to compulsive acts in anticipation of a reward, much like the feeling of craving chocolate and diverting your efforts to go and seek some.

Sugar (and fat) can be considered an addictive substance as we seek it in excessive palatable quantities despite knowing that it is bad for our health, because it makes us feel good for a moment. That is an informal definition of an addiction.

I work at an animation and design studio, and they’re having me work on an online game that ties into candy purchases. So, soon kids can just buy the candy and rather than have to pay for the game, the candy comes with codes that let them play the game for “free”
Nothing better than combining the addictive power of gaming and sugar into one campaign.

Metabolic byproducts from wheat and dairy can demonstrate opiate-like behavior and cross the blood-brain-barrier. This has been suggested to account for symptoms such as brain fog.

Additionally food sensitivities can lead to addictive behavior. The theory is that your body is unable to produce enough antibodies against the offending food antigens, so your body craves the food so that your immune system cannot keep up (and therefore keeps you symptom-free)… When the patient then stops consuming the food, the immune system is able to catch up and react to the antigens then creating withdrawal symptoms.

Personally, I think that sugar is like alcohol and everything else, it can become addictive. Personally, I think am addicted to sugar. Seems more harmless than other vices, it is food, you need food-which is why people discount it as an addiction. Just like an alcoholic who will not put down the bottle, I cannot put down the sugar. I am currently food journaling and am becoming very much aware how excess sugar is playing a role in my anxiety. Anyone who thinks that our food is not being engineered to make you want more by the large food producers are in denial. Two great books I read so far are Sugar Blues and Potatoes Not Prozac. I am still exploring this issue myself as a lay person who is worried about my health. I really look forward to your further findings on this subject – Thank you for opening Pandora’s Box

Like Beth says, I think one problem here is the definition of addiction. I don’t classify any food as truly addictive in the manner of drugs or alcohol, but I think there are certain things that can trigger us to overeat (any form of fried potato for me), and, further, that we can consume such high quantities of these trigger foods that we desensitize ourselves and feel like we need more (which the food manucacturers are more than happy to do for us). Further, we can come to associate certain foods with certain moods or states, so we feel that any celebration, for instance, requires Doritos or cheesecake or whatever. Conditioning more than true addiction, to my mind.

That said, though, I’ve never been a person who struggles with addictions of any kind, so maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about.

Addiction is tricky and involves: a habit-forming substance, tolerance and withdrawal.

There is research supporting that sugar is addictive, and there is research that finds sugar is not addictive. “Research” may have agendas, bias, particular funding, or it may not. While “research” is clinical and involves numbers and statistics as well as people/lab rats, I also believe individuals have an important role in our bigger understanding of issues like addiction. Their stories are not clinical but they are real.

In my own project to keep sugar out of my diet, I have heard from hundreds of people who talk about their “addiction”. Many heart-breaking stories of sugar consumption sound all too much like an alcoholic’s story of alcohol consumption and addiction.

I appreciate your bringing this issue of sugar “addiction” to the table. There is much still to be learned.

I do believe we are addicted to sugar, but as a society. We’re addicted in the same way we’re addicted to fast food dollar menus, big box stores, chinese made consumer electronics and Nicholas Cage movies. The average person (not someone who reads Marion’s blog) often just doesn’t know any better. When a person’s entire life is led in a built-environment, constantly bombarded by very slick and attractive advertising for high-fructose corn syrup, white flour and chemicals (most of what the food industry produces) they’ll choose a vitamin-fortified-orange-flavored sports drink over a tangerine everytime.

We are constantly surrounded by “choice”, making healthy choices difficult. Our stores have 40 different flavors of Little Debbie snack cakes and no kale. Presented with 8 flavors of ice cream, 22 different candy bars and 10 kinds of chips, who would opt to pay the same price for a bruised Red Delicious apple? Products like Kashi and Nature’s Valley make those choices even more difficult. (Full disclosure, I like Nature’s Valley peanut butter granola bars, but I know they’re bad for me. They’re just sugar.) “If the package says it’s healthy, then it must be, right?” Everyone who’s and RD or a Nutrition Educator knows that Less Bad≠Good, but your average man on the street doesn’t. It’s the kind of thing that well educated middle class Americans who care about food policy forget. In the same way that we forget that some people don’t want our help – they don’t care if they’re healthy or not. But it makes getting healthy and eating well even more complicated when people are surrounded by false choice.

The food industry has a very vested interest in our consumption of tankerloads of empty calories. Why? Because they’re cheap to produce and have a huge profit margin. Why? Corn and wheat subsidies. In the purest business sense, you’d be mad to sell people fresh strawberries (difficult to harvest, very fragile, short shelf life) when you could sell them fruit snacks made from refined corn and chemicals. As long as food conglomerates can buy corn and wheat for less than it costs other corporations to grow it, the agragate food landscape in America will never change.

So is sugar physically and chemically addictive, or is that dependence purely psychological? I don’t think it matters. Either way, we’re so addicted to our lifestyles and our rabid-overconsumption that arguing the point seems trival. Who cares if the lights don’t work when the plane is crashing?

David Benton’s paper in Clinical Nutrition is partially funded by the World Sugar Research Organization (an international scientific research organisation supported by the sugar industry globally).

That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily biased.

@Mason

Well said–that about covers it!

I hope Marion will return to this topic and perhaps clarify the term “addiction” (especially as used in the studies she cites) for us.

As an anthropologist, I have to remind you all that no matter how much technology we invent, we are still pleistocene people and we did not evolve to consume sweets in quantity or daily. Can we adapt? Maybe, but obesity doesn’t seem to offer any adaptive advantage.

As many other people have commented, I have personal addiction-like experience with sugar. There is no doubt that when I allow myself to eat sugary products (even dried fruit), I crave more sugary products. And when I force myself to forgo products with added sugar or foods that are inherently sugary like dried fruit, I stop having intense food-cravings after a few days and don’t start having food cravings until I eat something sweet. Is it an addiction? No, I don’t think so. But there is a definitely similar pattern. Maybe we need a vocabulary word for “addiction-light” that describes these circumstances where it is not so dramatic as cocaine or heroin, but where there is a definite relationship between behavior and consumption.

My experience is actually more than just foods with added sugars. I love crackers and I used to eat several servings of crackers every day. I would have to eat every couple of hours. Then I forced myself to eat a serving of vegetables instead of crackers and within a week I could go up to 4 hours without feeling at all hungry, I stopped craving crackers all of the time, and since I felt significantly less hungry I was eating much less food by volume. I never would have thought that substituting a lemon cucumber or a 1/2 cup of tomatoes would cut 2-3 cups of crackers out of my diet. Was it technically an addiction? No, but I’m certainly refering to it as an addiction within my own mind.

[...] SUGAR ADDICTIVE?” is the title of Marion Nestle’s blog post dated January 7, 2010, on her wonderful, most informative blog, Food [...]

The food addiction model is very popular in some circles. For instance, Neil Barnard of Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine is convinced casein is a highly addictive substance and the only sane thing a “cheese addict” can do is to totally abstain. Not even a sprinkle of Parmesan on one’s (otherwise healthy-fat-free) pasta.

The science on this seems to be unsettled at the moment but what troubles me is that the food addiction promoters use the exact same language as a twelve step program and only offer the same solution, total abstinence. This seems suspicious to me.

That being said, humans have shown an extraordinary capacity to take any single substance and become “addicted” to it in some way or another that turns pleasure into pain and even death. Whether or not this is a psychological process that makes use of physical properties or something in the food itself that causes a psychological problem seems more than semantics and a real problem for science to investigate.

I guess the question here is: does sugar in and of itself contain some factor that causes addiction? And as someone here has noted, what exactly is addiction anyway? The definition is still pretty squishy.

The above comment “Is Sugar Addictive?” is actually a blog site that is stealing my posts and may be doing the same with your posts. When you click on the name, it takes you to a blog that is not mine, but publishes my post (which is more of a discussion about sugar addiction and links back to Food Politics). Besides contacting Blogger, I would delete this “comment” which is stealing blog posts.

As long as I don’t eat sweets, I don’t overeat. Once I start eating something sweet, especially and more powerfully if it’s also made with grains — think cookies, cake, etc — but even if it’s not, I become obsessed with the idea of eating more more more and cannot stop.

If I treat bready and sweet things like I treat alcohol (I’m a recovering alcoholic and have been sober since 1983), which is to say, not eat them at all, I can control my eating.

Seems pretty simple to me.

I’m not more saying that this is true of everyone and sugar is in and of itself “addictive,” any more than I’m saying that everyone who consumes alcohol is an alcoholic or likely to become one.

But clearly, some of us are.

[...] SUGAR ADDICTIVE?” is the title of Marion Nestle’s blog post dated January 7, 2010, on her wonderful, most informative blog, Food [...]

Interesting… Benton says:

“… addicts would experience increased food cravings, predominantly for sweet items;”

Yes, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that this happens. Of course, anecdotal evidence isn’t admisable in science, but that only flies if there in fact has been any genuine study of increased cravings in putative sugar addicts. Has there been? If not, then anecdotal evidence, while not the gold standard, must be taken seriously rather than being ignored.

“… cravings would be especially strong in the morning, after an overnight fast;”

And again, lots of anecdotal evidence here, too. Actually, it shows up all the time in diet manuals–about the sugar crave & hit one gets with orange juice, donuts, bagels, etc.

“… obese people would find sweet foods particularly attractive”

Now this is just bizarre. Is the assumption that ALL obese people are also sugar addicts? Why in the world assume that? This is like saying that all drug users must be addicted to heroin–nonsense. There are lots of ways to use drugs, and many sorts that are addictive. Similarly, there are lots of ways to gain weight, sugar consumption being only one of them.

“… and high sugar consumption would predispose people to obesity”

Well, maybe. Unless they’ve got a rocket-charged metabolism, or are an athlete or otherwise very active, for example. As Marion always says, calories in, calories out.

Of course, I’ve only read the bit excerpted here, but based on that, I have… less than a lot of faith in Benton’s conclusions.

Fantastic Bloggers for your Pandora’s box full of facts and data! Trying to get a handle on all these comments over the past few days substantiates my perspectives about sugar (or carb?) cravings as more potent for some individuals rather than all. Terming “addiction” may have scientific connotations unknown to me, but anecdotal support is well documented here. Add the sugar cravings of recovered alcoholics, and the hypersensitivity to sugars in the American Indian (and others) at higher risk for diabetes and we begin to observe links that a sophisticated computer system or just a highly intelligent body of scientists could begin to draw conclusions from. We are well on our way to provide some type of “cure” for those powerless individuals lacking the savvy to control their self destructive, detrimental behaviors.