Sugar, A “Bitter” Truth

Sugar is 8 times as addictive as cocaine!! What? You’re kidding, right? What does “8 times addictive” mean? Do we get hooked 8 times faster? Are the withdrawal symptoms 8 times worse? This statement tends to alarm many people.

Sugar, according to Wikipedia, is a generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Why do we eat food? We eat food to obtain energy to carry out our daily activities whether it be studying, exercising, etc. There are 6 essential nutrients that the body needs to function properly.

Nutrients are compounds in foods essential to life and health, providing us with energy, the building blocks for repair and growth, and substances necessary to regulate chemical processes. There are six major nutrients: Carbohydrates (CHO), Lipids (fats), Protein, Vitamins, Minerals, Water.

Fats!!! The one thing that has been blamed to be one of the major causes of heart diseases, obesity, and other life-threatening disorders. This notion is partly supported as Saturated fat is not good for our health.

Diet-Heart Hypothesis- For the 20th-century, food habits put forward the notion that the amount of fat you eat, especially saturated fats leads to very high levels of fat in the blood. This fat then adheres to the walls of the blood vessels to cause coronary artery disease.

Ancel Keys was especially concerned about blood levels of fat cholesterol because it’s found in the fatty build ups in blood vessels. The Framingham heart study supported the link between blood cholesterol and heart diseases. Until the 1970s however, there was no conclusive proof that reducing saturated fats could actually protect hearts.

In the 1970s and 80s, everyone was told to cut down on cheese, butter, and beef to avoid heart attacks and strokes. Many nutritionists and experts doubted that/ questioned that this specific diet which was now being championed had never been tested. The results, however, were completely different from what they were expected to be. The low-fat diet which was considered to be the aid did not help in weight management and obesity cases skyrocketed.

The seven countries study showed strong correlations between sugar consumption and heart attacks. But this finding was not given much attention and was not moved further to fruition. The reason for the same was because it looked like saturated fat was the better predictor. Low carb diets seem to lead to slightly higher increases in good cholesterol and bigger drops in triglycerides.

In 1967, the sugar industry giants paid 3 Harvard public health researchers what would now be $50,000 to write a review article in the New England Journal of Medicine that highlighted the role of fat & downplayed any involvement of sugar. But 20 years later, after half a century of fat-hating, the tide began to slowly turn against them, both in the lab and at home.

Table sugar/sucrose is made up of one molecule of fructose and one molecule of glucose. Fructose is in honey, it’s in fruit juice, it’s in high fructose corn syrup. It is what makes sweet, sweet. Sugar is consumed on a daily basis. It is not necessary for any biochemical reaction in the body, you don’t need it to survive. Like alcohol and other toxins, it is processed primarily in the liver.

Robert Lustig puts forward a point that a can of Budweiser and a can of Coke are essentially the same. He is the one responsible for bringing the detrimental effects of sugar into the light. Although, at first he can sound a bit over the top when speaking about sugar — ‘Sugar is a poison. It is a chronic, dose-dependent hepato-liver toxin’. However, he backs all his sayings with 16 yrs of medical research, academic discourse, policy & data analysis, a whole lot of patient care, and the biochemistry of how sugar is processed in our body. The diagram below shows the biochemistry as a flowchart.

Once we understand how sugar is processed in the body, it leaves very little debate as to whether or not sugar could be considered a toxin. A lot of modern health issues are postulated to be caused by sugar.

When eating a non-toxic carbohydrate — only 20% of the glucose we eat actually hits the liver because the rest 80% is metabolized by the other cells of our body. Before glucose can get into the liver cell, it needs to stimulate the pancreas to make insulin. The insulin will then stimulate the insulin receptor IRS 1, which causes a series of reactions to stimulate SREBP1 and activate the enzyme glucokinase. This enzyme takes glucose to glucose 6 phosphate which mostly gets stored as glycogen in the liver.

Glycogen is good and acts as a reserve tank of energy that our body can access whenever necessary. What doesn’t get converted to glycogen is metabolized to pyruvate which enters the mitochondria. Mitochondria is like the coal furnace of a cell because it converts the pyruvate to Acetyl coenzyme A then burns that in the TCA cycle (TriCarboxylic acid cycle) to produce ATPs (Adenine Dinucleotide Phosphate). ATPs are regarded as the energy currency of the cell.

Not all of the ‘non-toxic’ carbohydrate is gonna get burned off, so a little may be left as citrate. The SREBP1 now activates enzymes to start a process called de novo lipogenesis (New Fat Making). The cell takes this leftover citrate and converts it into fat. The liver doesn’t want the fat accumulated in itself. Thus, the fat gets converted down to VLDL (Very Low-Density Lipoprotein) which is stored in our fat tissue. Not only this leads to increased fat accumulation but also is one of the major reasons for heart diseases. Statistically speaking, whatever sweet we eat approximately 1/50th part tends to go to VLDL.

Now talking about how sugar, fructose to be precise is treated or processed by our body. Fructose is not necessary to the body so it’s treated as a foreign substance and almost 100% of it is processed in the liver. The process starts and this gets metabolized down to pyruvate and enters the mitochondria. Everything goes straight to the liver, nothing is stored as glycogen which tends to overload the liver cell’s mitochondria. The pyruvate goes through the TCA cycle, produces a bunch of citrates and that gets converted down to VLDL. This leads to an increased risk of heart diseases and visceral fat accumulation. This leads to the development of what is called the Soda Belly.

It exits the cell as free fatty acids leading to muscle insulin resistance. Not all of the fat can get out of the cell thus some are stored in the liver and you get non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The same JNK1 is stimulated which promotes inflammation and JNK1 acts on the same IRS 1 insulin receptor causing insulin resistance in the liver.

There is one more element of fructose metabolism that makes it generate so much fat. Fructose forms xylulose- 5 phosphate, and this further stimulate de novo lipogenesis. And when it gets converted to fructose 1 phosphate, it produces uric acid. Uric acid raises the blood pressure. Thus, various levels of disorders are associated with the same.

The closer we remain to the natural state of things, the less dangerous and problematic they are. Substances like tobacco and opium only become truly hazardous to our health and terribly addictive only when we extensively refine them. Cocaine is produced from the refinement of coca leaves. Farmers in the Andes had chewed these leaves and the only thing they got was bad teeth.

Alcohol doesn’t get bad until we refine them, distill them. Alcoholics will skip the weaker fermented alcohols like beer, wine, or cider and stick to the harder alcohols like whiskey, gin, and vodka. The result of refinement is increasing the concentration of a particular ingredient that will affect our brain’s reward system. What happens is the substance either occupies our dopamine receptors or causes dopamine to be released and it makes us feel good. Thus we get more bang for the buck.

Sugar also affects the brain dopamine process and is also a product of refinement. Compared to other tastes, sweet activates our reward center even more. Evolution programmed us to seek sweet foods in particular. One of the reasons is that sweet foods are very rarely poisonous. Sugar also has an opiate-like effect. The sugar activates the endogenous opioid receptor system providing enough analgesia.

The refinement process from sugarcane to that cube of sugar is 10. What this numerical portrays is that the product out of the refinement process is 10 times sweeter than what we started with. An average American consumes 82 grams of sugar/day. To put this in perspective they would have to chew 2 lbs of sugarcane for the same amount of sugar. Sugar has some parallels to narcotics but how are they addictive? Addiction to sugar is proven in animals whilst for people it would be different.

There is no quantification of how much sugar is too much. Coming back to the initial questions that were discussed, a study from 2007 presented rats with the chance of choosing either sweetened water or a cocaine water solution for 8 times a day. They almost always picked up the sweetened. Other studies also showed that rats even though already addicted to cocaine will quickly forget about the cocaine and work much harder to get sugar, even when it means walking over a panel that will repeatedly shock them. If you are experiencing sugar addiction, you know about it right?

According to the APA Diagnostic and statistical manual, a list of 7 needs to be fulfilled out of which 5 are psychological.

Cocaine downregulates dopamine receptors. The same thing is seen with people who extensively consume sugar. Studies on neuroplasticity have shown drug users have similar behavioral addiction to those addicted to sugar. Sugar is addictive and comes without the immediate social repercussions of freq drug use.

People who quit sugar often complain of symptoms such as lightheadedness, anxiety, mood swings, muscle aches, general fatigues, headaches, and physical tremors or the shakes.

Ever since the low fat craze, our food supply has become more and more overrun by added sugars and now 80% of our food has sugar added to it. One of the reasons is that when we take out fat from something, it tastes like garbage. If we are a company looking to maximize our profits, our product needs to appeal to healthier & conscious consumers and it needs to taste good.

Food companies found that the taste could be improved by just adding sugar. So they take out the fat from the product to brand it fat-free and then replace the fat with the sugars so that it tastes good.

Bliss’s point is the term the food industry uses to describe the point at which a product is most likable for the majority of consumers. And the majority of consumers like more sugar than less. The bliss point is going to be the point at which max amt of sugar has been added before the product becomes too sweet. This includes everything from pizza, sauce, salad dressing, etc. Corn derived sweetener in almost everything.

There are various health-related disorders also associated with sugar.

Scientists from Leiden university medical center in the Netherlands measured blood sugar levels of 600 men and women aged between 50–70 and showed them to 60 other participants and found that those with higher blood sugar looked older than those with lower blood sugar.

For every 1 mm / ltr increase in blood sugar, the perceived age of that person rose by 5 months.

Sugar is associated with acne. Foods ranked high on the glycemic index such as sugar and refined carbohydrates have been associated with greater amounts of acne on the face and body. According to the latest study on Australian men, showed that those with diets with low glycemic load showed a great reduction in overall acne.

Sugary drinks caused an 83% increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes. A study on 91,249 women showed that those who consumed one sugar-sweetened beverage a day had the same result as mentioned as compared to those who had one beverage a month.

Sugar intake increases the risk of developing certain cancers. There has been a direct link seen between breast and colon cancer with sugar consumption. This is likely because insulin is a key factor in cell growth and multiplication. Sugar spikes insulin to abnormally high levels

Sugar can ruin our teeth. A study done by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that sugar destroyed the healthy bacteria in the mouth. This can cause tooth erosions and may dim that bright smile.

There are 5 reasons as to why sugar can cause us to gain weight:

Sugar is the premier definition of empty calories. It has no nutritional values, no nutrients, no minerals, no fiber, and no proteins.

Because of the lack of nutrients, sugar makes us hungry and in a study done by Yale University, those that consumed sugar had increased appetite and desire for more. So not only sugar fills you with empty calories and makes us want more and wanting more calories. This process happens when sugar screws the hormonal levels.

Sugar can give us wrinkles and adds age to our faces.

Sugar blocks leptin and raises insulin to supernatural levels. Leptin is a hormone in charge of telling us we are full and need to stop eating. It also tells us we have energy and should go out and use that energy. Increased insulin makes it hard for the body to access and burn stored fat.

Sugar causes belly fat. Numerous studies have shown direct links from sugar to increased amounts of belly fat. This is the worst kind of fat as it is associated with n no. of diseases including heart disease. Despite knowing all this, it is hard to stop eating sugar.

Cutting down on sugar is a very efficient way of weight loss.

Fiber helps prevent sugar in fruit from becoming a problem. Fiber reduces the rate of intestinal absorption meaning our liver can easily handle the steady stream of sugar from a piece of fruit. The fiber will also fill us up. Fruits have fiber, vitamins, minerals, water, and tons of nutrients that refined sugars don’t have. Pay attention to fruit sugars if we have weight loss goals. Fruit smoothies do not solve the purpose.

Thus, the role of sugar in deteriorating our overall health is becoming increasingly evident with new researches and findings coming into the limelight.

As Parceliues said — “the dose makes the poison”.

If we don’t actively consume sugar and in excess, don’t need to worry about that.