A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg called sugar ‘straight-up drugs’
As sugar consumption has gone up, so has evidence of sugar addiction
Phife Dawg was a co-founder of A Tribe Called Quest, one of the most influential and inventive hip-hop groups ever. He was also — somewhat famously — a diabetic, and when he died this week of complications from the disease, media reports repeated a statement he made several years ago.
“It’s really a sickness,” he said in a 2011 documentary on the group. “Like straight-up drugs. I’m just addicted to sugar.”
Even a few years ago, that might have seemed like a comic overstatement. Heroin. Cocaine. These were the substances that got you hooked and ruined your life. Not sweet old sugar.
But over the past decade, more research has emerged, showing that sugar actually does have addictive properties — that it lights up receptors in animal brains in the same way as smack or blow. Now sugar addicts can go to 12-step programs, support groups or therapy for treatment.
Nutritionists say, though, that the science is still very new, and it’s difficult to disentangle sugar addiction from overeating more broadly, especially because sugar is so ubiquitous in processed foods.
“There aren’t any statistics because there is still no diagnosis or scientific consensus on the issue of sugar addiction,” explained dietitian, Andy Bellatti. “There are a number of animal studies showing that sugar stimulates the brain in a fashion similar to that of some addictive drugs.”
But why is that research emerging only recently?
In the US, consumption of refined sugar — the stuff that comes from cane or sugar beets — has actually gone down over the past decades. In 1950 Americans consumed just under 97 pounds of sugar a year. Fifty years later, that had dropped to under 66 pounds.
But, over that same period, sweetener consumption shot up, from about 110 pounds a year to 152, mostly thanks to corn sweeteners, particularly high fructose corn syrup. And, while there’s some debate over whether our waistlines are impacted differently by the two, our brains’ responses are about the same.
Sweet is sweet — and we’ve been hard-wired to want it from birth, research suggests.
We like sugar so much, in fact, that historically we’ve put a huge premium on it. In 16th-century England a teaspoon of sugar cost the equivalent of $5, which meant only the rich could afford sweet things.
But non-rich people began to want sugar, too, and that sparked a global trade that saw sugar cane plantations spread through the world. “In 1700 the average Englishman consumed 4 pounds a year,” according to a 2013 National Geographic report. “In 1800 the common man ate 18 pounds of sugar. In 1870 that same sweet-toothed bloke was eating 47 pounds annually. Was he satisfied? Of course not! By 1900 he was up to 100 pounds a year. In that span of 30 years, world production of cane and beet sugar exploded from 2.8 million tons a year to 13 million plus.”
Over time, sugar became cheaper. But sweetener didn’t get really, really cheap until the 1970s, when high fructose corn syrup entered the world’s sweetener equation. Food and beverage makers, looking for an inexpensive alternative to sugar, began switching to high fructose corn syrup in the 1980s, and by 2000 production had shot up to 9 million tons. Government subsidies and mandates, along with new technologies, helped make corn the most abundant crop in the US — and, with about 5% of corn going into high fructose corn syrup, that translated to a whole lot of sweetener.
Coincidentally, over the same period, government nutrition advisers began warning of the perils of fat — notably with the release of the US government’s 1980 Dietary Guidelines for All Americans. That drove food makers to satisfy consumers’ anti-fat appetites by producing “low fat” foods.
The problem, though, was that low-fat food tasted horrible — unless you amped up the sweetener. Food manufacturers began tucking sweetener into everything from cookies to sauces. All of a sudden, sweetener was not just everywhere you looked, but hiding in places you would never expect, like a SnackWell cracker. (Some nutrition experts called this the SnackWell Effect.)
“Processed foods are meant to be palatable, so we could argue there’s some force behind this idea of eating addiction,” said Marina Chaparro, a dietitian and founder of Nutrichicos, a Miami-based nutrition consultancy. “But it’s not [sugar] per se. It’s rather we’re having access to so much food, the marketing of the food, and certain individuals could be predisposed. There are a lot of factors.”
Just seven years after the low-fat guidelines, in 1987, the country’s first-ever sugar support group — Food Addicts Anonymous — launched to help people abstain from sugar.
Coincidence? Maybe not.
But whether sugar addiction is a real problem or not, one thing is clear. “We’re overweight,” Chaparro said. “We’re just consuming way too much sugar.”
