Imagine a drug that can intoxicate us, can infuse us with energy, and can do so when taken by mouth.
It doesn’t have to be injected, smoked, or snorted for us to experience its sublime and soothing effects. Imagine that it mixes well with virtually every food and particularly liquids, and that when given to infants it provokes a feeling of pleasure so profound and intense that its pursuit becomes a driving force throughout their lives.
Sounding familiar?
Overconsumption of this drug may have long-term side effects, but there are none in the short term – no staggering or dizziness, no slurring of speech, no passing out or drifting away, no heart palpitations or respiratory distress.
When it is given to children, its effects may be only more extreme variations on the apparently natural emotional roller coaster of childhood, from the initial intoxication to the tantrums and whining of what may or may not be withdrawal a few hours later.
Overconsumption of this drug may have long-term side effects, but there are none in the short term.
More than anything, our imaginary drug makes children happy, at least for the period during which they’re consuming it. It calms their distress, eases their pain, focuses their attention, and then leaves them excited and full of joy until the dose wears off. The only downside is that children will come to expect another dose, perhaps to demand it, on a regular basis.
A little too familiar?
Sugar craving does seem to be hard-wired in our brains. Children certainly respond to it instantaneously, from birth (if not in the womb) onward. Sugar does induce the same responses in the region of the brain known as the “reward centre” – technically, the nucleus accumbens – as do nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol.
Addiction researchers have come to believe that behaviours required for the survival of a species—specifically, eating and sex—are experienced as pleasurable in this part of the brain, and so we do them again and again.
Sugar does induce the same responses in the region of the brain known as the “reward centre”.
Is sugar a drug?
Sugar stimulates the release of the same neurotransmitters – dopamine in particular – through which the potent effects of these other drugs are mediated.
Because the drugs work this way, humans have learned how to refine their essence into concentrated forms that heighten the rush. Coca leaves, for instance, are mildly stimulating when chewed, but powerfully addictive when refined into cocaine; even more so taken directly into the lungs when smoked as crack cocaine.
The sugar rush.
Sugar, too, has been refined from its original form to heighten its rush and concentrate its effects, albeit as a nutrient that provides energy as well as a chemical that stimulates pleasure in the brain.
By the early 20th century, sugar had assimilated itself into all aspects of our eating experience—consumed during breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. A century later still, sugar has become an ingredient avoidable in prepared and packaged foods only by concerted and determined effort, effectively ubiquitous.
Sugar, too, has been refined from its original form to heighten its rush and concentrate its effects.
Sugar in disguise.
From the 1980s onward, manufacturers of products advertised as uniquely healthy because they were low in fat or specifically in saturated fat (not to mention “gluten-free, no MSG & 0g trans fat per serving”) took to replacing those fat calories with sugar to make them equally, if not more, palatable, and often disguising the sugar under one or more of the fifty-plus names by which the fructose-glucose combination of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be found.
Fat was removed from candy bars, sugar added or at least kept, so that they became health-food bars. Fat was removed from yoghurts and sugars added, and these became heart-healthy snacks, breakfasts, and lunches.
The powerful influence of sugar.
Sugar and sweets became a primary contribution to our celebrations of holidays and accomplishments, both major and minor. For those of us who don’t reward our existence with a drink (and for many of us who do), it’s a candy bar, a dessert, an ice-cream cone, or a Coke (or Pepsi) that makes our day.
For those of us who are parents, sugar and sweets have become the tools we wield to reward our children’s accomplishments, to demonstrate our love and our pride in them, to motivate them, to entice them. Sweets have become the currency of childhood and of parenting.
The alternative way to think about [sugar] is a kind of intoxication… analogous to that of other drugs of abuse.
The common tendency is, again, to think of this transformation as driven by the mere fact that sugars and sweets taste good. We can call it the “pause that refreshes” hypothesis of sugar history.
A drug of abuse.
The alternative way to think about this is that sugar took over our diets because the first taste, whether for an infant today or for an adult centuries ago, is an astonishment, a kind of intoxication; it’s the kindling of a lifelong craving, not identical but analogous to that of other drugs of abuse.
This is an edited extract from The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes.
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