We all love to eat, especially the sweet stuff.
This is because consuming sweet foods is intimately connected with our brain’s pleasure centre. When we eat sweet-tasting food, we are ramping up the production of a brain chemical called dopamine. This substance is associated with reward and motivation and it’s this feel-good hormone that envelops us in a cocoon of warmth and contentment. It’s not hard to understand then why we love eating these foods so much and why just about all our eating behaviours are focused on enjoying at least something which is sweet.
Historically, when we were hunter-gatherers sustained by roots and shoots and some animal protein, finding sweet foods like fruit was a novelty. It wasn’t easily accessible and thus was highly prized. Today our access is simply a supermarket away and sweet foods are everywhere, especially at the checkout where we may be tempted to slip that enticing chocolate bar into our shopping bags. We can gorge ourselves on sweet foods like there is no tomorrow and therein lies the problem.
Tomorrow might be coming sooner than we think.
The obesity epidemic, which is engulfing our communities like a raging tsunami is in no small part due to our love affair with sugar, but it’s a honeymoon and a death trap that is potentially lethal.
Breast cancer, the leading cancer in women, is increasing in prevalence worldwide, at the same time that obesity and diabetes are flourishing, and research shows that our dietary indiscretions underpin these epidemics. The same can be said for prostate and bowel cancer. What causes diseases like Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s is undeniably complex but there is no doubt that the more sugar we eat, the more we are coating our brain cells with treacle, making them increasingly dysfunctional and ageing them prematurely.
Dysbiosis, or the imbalance of germs in our gut, also accelerates when we pour sugar into our bodies. The gut is closely connected with our brain function – disturb the healthy symbiosis of organisms in our internal organs and our brains will unravel. The latest scientific evidence has even shown that emotional disorders like anxiety and depression, as well as insomnia, are all linked to a disruption of gut bacteria. Recalibrate these and the brain can reset in a much more organised and emotionally stable manner.
You don’t have to be overweight to have dysfunctional sugar metabolism. For those who want to uncover this disordered metabolic state before it sets us up to develop the diseases of ageing, a test that examines our body’s capacity to utilise sugar or glucose efficiently over time can provide us with vital biochemical information that we can action before this trend becomes irreversible.
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