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Anyone who loves to eat sweet things please raise your hands! Have you ever experienced the state of having no energy, easily getting upset, having a blurred brain, and not being refreshed because you didn’t intake sugar? If so, this is a sign that you are ‘addicted to sugar’!
It can’t be denied that we can access sugar easily these days within food, snacks, and beverages. Sugar has received more acceptance than drugs or alcohol, so it is hard to avoid. Many researchers and nutritionists say that sugar has addictive properties like addictive substances, and it’s best to get less sugar each day.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends consuming no more than 6 teaspoons of sugar per day (24 grams) in normal people, but the survey found that Thais consume three times as much sugar or 20 teaspoons of sugar a day.
Let’s get to know about the brain system first. There is a part in our brain called “The Brain Reward System” or a part that will make us feel pleased and happy. Frequent stimulation in this part of the brain will give us the desire to get it over and over again. Factors that stimulate this part include addictive substances, relationships, gambling, food, and even sugar.
Eating sugar will stimulate the Brain Reward System in our brain to release substances that make people feel relaxed, happy like opioids and dopamine, which makes them want to experience this feeling repeatedly. Research on mice from Connecticut College has shown that ‘Oreo cookies stimulate neurons in the happiness centers in mice’s brains more than ‘cocaine’. (Mice also eat the cream inside before the cookies just like human does)
The food we eat today is known to contain more sugar content than normal natural diet, making the body think of this as a non-normal stimulation, so our brain adjusts by reducing the response to control sugar from being too active.
Therefore, during the time that we don’t eat sugar or refrain from it for a while, we will feel exhausted, dizzy, easily get upset, and unusually anxious. Thus, when these symptoms occur, people who are addicted to sugar have to eat a bigger amount of sugar to trigger the brains to release the happiness substances to get them back to a normal mood, not get upset and not exhausted.
This can be the reason why we fail every time we try to stop drinking sweet drinks or eating sweet snacks. This is because of this substance that triggers us to feel anxious, feel that we cannot live without sugar and have to eat it over and over again.
However, we can break off our addiction to sugar by changing our eating behavior. We may slowly reduce the amount of sugar that we eat each day, do not seasoning with sugar, and eat more food that is good for our health to reduce the risk of diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, stroke and heart disease, and will not make us look older than our age.
