Did you know that you’re a drug addict?

Two recent studies show that whether you know it or not, you’re an addict, and your poison is sugar.

The first study is one in which rats were allowed a choice between cocaine and sugar water, and choose the sugar water over the cocaine- even if they were cokehead rats.  Pretty scary.

The second, more recent study published in Nature Neuroscience, shows that the same chemical changes in the brain occur with junk food eating as with drug abuse.  Namely, that the pleasure centers of the brain get overloaded, and you need more and more of the “fix” to just feel like you’re not sliding backwards.

I tell my patients about this all time.  The nervous system has a quality called “accomodation”, meaning, it gets used to stuff.  Stick your hand in a hot bucket of water, and eventually, it won’t feel hot anymore… even if the water is still hot.  Your nerves will change their thermostat, so to speak, to account for this higher stimulus.

So, if you’re constantly bombarding your body with a free-base version of sugar intake, you guessed it, you too will get accustomed to that super-sweet taste.  Soon, even normal tasting stuff will taste bland by comparison.

But these studies suggest something further.  Your body releases chemicals in the brain to make you feel good- that’s how you get runner’s high and stuff like that- and these studies are saying that sugary foods feed into that pathway just like drugs such as cocaine and heroin.  And just like a heroin addict, if you don’t get your artificially inflated “fix” of feel-good chemicals, you will start feeling horrible by comparison.  Remember, you’re not craving sugar because you need sugar.  You’re craving sugar because your feel-good chemicals have returned to normal levels… and because you’re used to an artificially jacked-up level of feel-good chemicals, by comparison, you feel like you’re missing something or need something to make you feel better.

Pretty crazy, hunh?  But as one MD who commented on these articles put it, we bascially do the same thing to our food as we do to cocaine.  Cocaine in its natural state is a green leaf that is chewed on slowly by the natives, and used like that, it acts kind of like coffee.  No big deal.  Then the modern world came along, said “Hey!  We can make THAT better!”, and refined cocaine into a super-powerful substance that directly and massively stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain.

In the case of food, we take a normal, natural, healthy substance, and refine and process it until everything healthy has been stripped out of it and we’re left with a highly concentrated product that, like cocaine, also directly stimulates our brains in a way that it was never meant to handle.  Awesome.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So, yet one more reason why you should do your best to switch to an unprocessed, whole foods diet ASAP.  And, another reason why you should, just as I suggest in my book, do it by slow degrees.  Because really, you’re a recovering addict.  You just didn’t know it.