Sugar: America’s Favorite Recreational Drug

The following is an excerpt from the book How to be Thin: An Instruction Manual for Getting Rid of Fat and Keeping It Off Forever:

 

If you have ever jokingly admitted that you are “addicted to chocolate” or other types of foods that have high sugar content, you might be surprised at how right you were. While sugar has the power to make you fat more quickly than any other nutrient, it also has some addictive properties that are similar to those of heroin and morphine—and scientific studies have shown the exact mechanism of this process in your brain. Though for many people food itself has become a “drug,” with their compulsion to eat being similar to the behavior of a true drug addict, sugar is one food that really could be considered, in and of itself, a drug.

Consuming sugar causes a chemical reaction in your brain; specifically, it causes your brain to produce its own natural opioids—and these cause the drug-like effect. There is a very good reason why this happens. As was pointed out early on, you have the same biology as your ancient ancestors, who were always faced with a shortage of food. As such, your body always wants you to place a premium on eating. If an organism does not get enough food, eventually it will die. For any organism, the worst possible outcome is death—something your body will do everything in its power to avoid. To this end, it wants you to eat as much as possible, so that you can store fat. Your body will rely on this fat for survival during later times of famine.

Your body doesn’t know that you live in a world of fast food, supermarkets, and stocked refrigerators. However, your body is quite aware of its digestive capabilities. Even though processed sugar did not exist during man’s formative years, your body knows that it can convert this type of sugar into fat very, very quickly. By creating the sugar “high,” your body is giving you a little reward, to say thanks for feeding it sugar, and possibly for helping it to prolong its existence. Granted, mainlining heroin will give you a much more pronounced effect, but the “feel-good” effect of a drug is there regardless.

This is a rather large part of why people eat for emotional reasons, in particular why they use sugar to console themselves. Sugar will cause a reaction in your brain that will chemically and therefore emotionally make you feel better. This is exactly the same reason why people drink alcohol or use other drugs for emotional reasons. Attempting to lose weight while keeping sugar in your diet is a bit like allowing a recovering heroin addict to keep shooting up—though perhaps with smaller shots.

Sugar cravings are real and can be very powerful. Think of the last time you had something high in sugar, like for instance a donut. Your logical, conscious mind might be aware that the pleasure you got from the specific act of eating the donut was short-lived, lasting only a couple of minutes. However, the gravity of your physiological cravings will just about always supersede the value of your rational thoughts. For example: If you are a heavy sugar user, think about the next time you’ll have an opportunity to eat a donut. You probably won’t care that the pleasure will last only a couple of minutes. Maybe you won’t be concerned that you’ll feel guilty afterwards. You’ll worry about all that later. That’s not important right now. What’s important is eating the donut.

This might all sound curiously like the behavior and rationale of a drug addict. If you re-read the last paragraph and substitute “having a drink” for “eating a donut,” you’ll understand why so much sugar is consumed in this country, why there are so many overweight people, and why virtually all crash diets (which cause even more intense cravings) fail.

We tend to look at being a “sugar junkie” as campy and benign, but the physiological impulse to eat sugar needs to be taken seriously. Granted, in the short term, it’s totally harmless. Having a few cookies won’t cause you to crash your car, slur your speech, or wake up in a ditch. Since sugar is legal and very inexpensive, you won’t start robbing people or selling yourself to support your habit. Long-term use is a different story. Sugar does an excellent job of making you fat, or in the worst cases, obese. If you haven’t read it, the Why be thin? chapter outlines problems you will personally face from being overweight. But the use of sugar, just like traditional drugs, has an impact on people other than the user. If you become unhealthy, those that care for you will suffer. You will also require additional medical care, and you’ll be forced to rely on an industry that is already tremendously strained and increasingly inaccessible.

Sugar use is cheap in the short term, but you’ll pay in the long run, big time. Heavy sugar use will make you overweight and depressed. The more depressed you become, the more you’ll rely on sugar, since it can give you a noticeable (albeit brief) psychological lift. The process is something of an accelerating downward spiral, not unlike other types of chemical abuse. Completely removing sugar from your diet can be a critical part of becoming and staying thin. It can also be an important part of taking control of your life—since by eliminating sugar you will be exposing yourself to one less chemical with the power to obstruct that goal.

Some might think that a life with sugar is always better than a life without, but this is not true. If an omniscient entity were to account for the hypothetical pleasure or pain experienced over the course of a lifetime, it would almost certainly report that a life without sugar is happier than the opposite. Many people that do away with sugar report that they lead overall happier lives after making the change. Granted, you can have a happy and healthy life and still eat sugar, but the intake must be moderate or low. Sugar is an unnecessary and unhealthy (if not damaging and lethal) nutrient, with uplifting though brief effects and corresponding crashes and lows. Without sugar, you are “even keel.” Without it, you are also healthier, and in all likelihood, more thin. It is not an even tradeoff. A life without sugar is better.

Completely eliminating sugar is not necessary, but it will make things easier. As with all drugs, the following statement applies to sugar: The more you use it, the more you’ll want it. But this is also true: The longer you go without sugar, the less it will matter to you. In fact, the desire to eat sugar seems to have a “half life”: Sugar is most appealing when you eat it regularly. If you stop eating it, your desire to have more is slowly reduced. This rate of reduction can vary widely, depending upon how much sugar you eat on a daily basis, how long you have been using it, etc. For some people the half life might be a month: If they stop consuming sugar, after one month their desire for it will be about half as intense. After another month, the desire might be only a quarter of the initial level. And after yet another month, the level of desire will be an eighth. The appeal of sugar is continually reduced with time until it virtually ceases to exist. Just about all deliberately thin people—having sworn off sugar for a long enough period of time—report zero cravings for it. It has been long enough since their last servings of sugar that they don’t even remember what the craving feels like. Much to their benefit, they don’t know what they’re missing.

To become thin, severely restricting or completely eliminating sugar is essential. Virtually all deliberately thin people would agree with this. You’re therefore going to have to choose one or the other: Restriction or elimination. Though it may seem slightly counterintuitive, it actually requires less willpower to completely remove sugar from your diet than to allow some in. If sugar is completely cut out, its appeal will diminish in a way similar to what is described above. Eventually you won’t even care about it. Moreover, in time you’ll become happy that you made the decision to exclude it. If you leave some in, the lure of sugar will forever be present. It might be a craving that you will forever be fighting—and one that you will occasionally give in to. If you continue to eat sugar, to some degree you will forever have a dependence on it. This will not be the case if you make the decision to do away with it forever.

Some people will wonder how you can deny yourself the pleasure of eating sweet foods. The answer is very simple. It’s not much different from denying yourself the pleasure of shooting heroine or snorting cocaine. All three drugs have users that love their effects. All three can have horrible and even lethal side effects. Sugar use just happens to be legal, far more common, and a lot cheaper.

You might be thinking that the drug-like effect of sugar is being exaggerated in this chapter, since you don’t really feel anything resembling the spacey high of an opiate after eating sugar. You may have come to this opinion partially because (in the terms of addiction specialists) you’ve built up a tolerance to it. Heroine addicts don’t feel much of a high after shooting up for years either, because their tolerance is high. Many addicts shoot up just to feel normal.

Anyone that doubts the drug-like effect of sugar is welcome to try the following experiment: Go without sugar for a year. Once a year has elapsed, quickly eat and drink sugar-filled items: Things like cake and soda or fruit punch. Since your sugar tolerance will be low due to your abstention, you will get to experience a true and unimpeded sugar high. You’ll feel light-headed, and maybe even giggly. You’ll be in a “cloud,” with its accompanying sensation of tunnel or even blurry vision. Yes, that’s right; your vision can actually get blurry. You might even get nauseous or throw up. You can get all of these effects from eating sugar.

When compared to the effects of other recreational chemicals, sugar is actually a rather inferior drug. Its effects are short-lived, tolerance is achieved rapidly, and it can indirectly lead to early death or disablement via the vast number of maladies that are listed in the Quality chapter. In the worst cases of rampant sugar consumption, the user is inviting a slow and painful death. Sugar abuse can indirectly lead to these things by directly elevating your fat levels. While it is true that there are no fattening foods, just fattening amounts of foods, recreational use of sugar will almost assuredly make you fat. And there should be no misunderstanding on this point: High-sugar items are eaten for recreational purposes, not because there isn’t a better food alternative.

The effect of sugar on the human body could be described as remarkable and even alarming. What is even more distressing, however, is the degree to which it is consumed. Sugar use is rampant. The consumption of sugar and syrups in the United States may very well be the most telling indicator of the human tendency to favor immediate over delayed gratification: According to the US Department of Agriculture, in 1999 the average American ate 158 pounds of sugar. If sugar is indeed a recreational drug, it is without question America’s favorite.

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