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Saying "I'm addicted to sugar" isn't a joke -- a lot of people really are.

By Tim Lundeen  Beginning Noozer
Published: 21 October 2007 01:42 pm

- In Gary Taubes new book, he mentions in almost an off-hand way that sugar raises dopamine levels in the brain. I hadn't seen this before, and it struck me as a critical piece of the puzzle for weight gain and relapse after dieting. Dopamine is part of the brain's motivation/reward system, and a critical part of additiction to any substance. If something increases dopamine, you can get addicted to it.

So I had to find out more about this.

It turns out that sweets and fats both raise beta-endorphins in the brain and make you feel good. Beta-endorphins act through the same mechamisms as opioids such as morphine. They reduce pain and give you a sense of euphoria. If you smash your finger you will get a lot of pain, then a rush of endorphins to help you cope with the pain. If you eat something sweet or something fatty, you will get a rush of endorphins to tell you that it is good stuff, eat more of it. Ice cream is indeed the perfect feel-good food: sweet and fatty and flavorful, a real endorphin rush.

Increased beta-endorphins act to suppress dopamine reuptake, so whatever dopamine you have in your brain stays around longer and is more effective, in the same way the SSRI anti-depressants increase the level of seratonin. So this is the tie-in from sugar and fat to increased dopamine and potential addiction.

To get euphoria from eating sweets or fat makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Getting enough calories is important, and both sweets and fats used to be hard to find, so rewarding them made a lot of sense. Today, because we can produce food with virtually any desired mix of flavor, fat, and sweetness, food today can be a powerful drug for many people.

Fat doesn't seem to be as addictive as sugar. This is a good thing, because some fat is required to live, and extremely low-fat diets make you feel bad, so it is nice to be able to eat fat without getting out of control. (Unless you are starving, fat has to be combined with protein or carbohydrates to even be palatable.)

Sugar seems to release much more beta-endorphin than fat. My guess is that pure refined sugar causes a large blood sugar surge, followed by an insulin surge to keep blood sugar in a normal range. This glucose/insulin surge is likely the reason why sugar causes particularly high levels of beta-endorphins.

Most naturally-occuring sugar is combined with other nutrients and with fiber, so its impact isn't as large as refined sugar. When you eat an apple, you are eating about 50 calories of sugar, but combined with 3g of fiber and some fat, both of which slow the adsorption of the sugar. A can of coke, on the other hand, has 155 calories of sugar, and nothing to slow its adsorption down. It is hard to eat 3 apples in a row, but pretty easy to drink a coke, and then to have another one. (Tropical fruits are the exception to this, with extremely high sugar levels; fruit juice also has extremely high sugar content.)

People who are addicted to sugar suffer withdrawal when they stop eating refined sugars and equivalents such as white bread. It is common to get headaches, be in a bad mood, to have strong cravings, and to have these symptoms stop immediately if you start eating sugar again. Fortunately, they will go away with time, within 4-5 days. (You can avoid withdrawal symptoms by eating complex carbohydrates and gradually reducing sugars and refined flour.)

I think it is helpful to understand some of the biochemistry behind this. For me, it helps to avoid relapse now that I've cut my refined carbohydrate consumption down to almost nothing.

Some people are just more prone to become addicted to things. If you normally have more beta-endorphin receptors than average, you will feel a beta-endorphin surge more strongly. If you do some activity that continually gives you a beta-endorphin surge, your brain will develop tolerance and will reduce the number of beta-endorphin receptors so that it is not continually overloaded. As you develop tolerance, you need more of the activity or drug to continue to get the same high from it, as the brain continues to down-regulate your endorphin receptors.

If you then quit the drug or activity to which you have developed tolerance, the brain will gradually go back to normal. But for an addict, this means going back to a much higher level of receptors than average, so if you have "just one spoonful" of ice cream, or "just one drink", you get an incredible rush of endorphins. This rush, combined with learned behaviour and the strong dopamine drive all addicts have, can easily lead to relapse and a return to addiction.