Sugar, do do do do do do🎵　Aw honey honey,
do do do do🎵 You might have read something lately about
Sugar being 8 times as addictive as cocaine. This piece of information probably didn’t
do too much for you unless you are already anti sugar. Considering everyone has eaten
sugar at some point, how could this be alarming? I mean, logically if Sugar was 8 times as
addictive as cocaine, this statement would feel either entirely obvious or totally unrealistic.
That is- for most of us it sounds unrealistic, but If you’ve stabbed someone in the past
6 months for a piece of cake, then the information comes with little surprise. And what does that mean 8 times as addictive?
Do you get hooked 8 times faster? Are the withdrawal symptoms 8 times worse? Would you
kill 8 people to get some sugar, but only kill 1 person to get cocaine? Well, a study from 2007 presented rats with
the chance to choose either a sweetened water solution or a cocaine water solution 8 times
a day. They almost always picked the sweetened water. Other studies have shown that Rats,
even when already addicted to cocaine, will quickly forget about the cocaine and work
much harder to get sugar, even when it means walking over a panel that will repeatedly
shock them. But what are the implications for humans?
And should you even care? If you were experiencing sugar addiction, you’d surely know it by
now, right? “Hey, I got that for my birthday!” Several recreational substances exist in nature
without needing much processing, like dried tobacco leaves, beer from fermented barley,
or even the sap from the opium poppy plant. The closer you remain to the natural state
of these things, the less dangerous and problematic they are. While smoking tobacco in any form
is of course harmful to your health, it usually takes continuous use over a long period of
time for it to truly damage you. It’s very rare that someone would drink beer or wine
to the point that they get alcohol poisoning or become seriously addicted to alcohol. You
could even argue that opium was never a problem in human populations until it was conceived
of as a problem by british colonial policy makers. Italian aristocrat and actor Dado
Ruspoli had supposedly smoked opium for over 45 years without it having severe repercussions
on his life. Substances like this only become truly hazardous
to your health and terribly addictive when you extensively refine them. Around 1810,
morphine was derived from opium and was available in the US from the mid 1850’s to be used
as a painkiller by doctors. Due to injuries sustained during the Civil War, many soldiers
were exposed to morphine, and suddenly you had tens of thousands of morphine addicts.
Then in 1874, Heroin which is derived from morphine, was marketed as morphine’s non
addictive substitute and since then, the heroin addict has been ever present in American culture. Another example is the very dangerous and
very addictive cocaine, which is also a product of refinement. The refinement of coca leaves.
These leaves had been chewed by farmers in the Andes for hundreds of years for a boost
in energy, and the worst they got from constant chewing of the leaves was maybe bad teeth. Alcohol too doesn’t get that bad until you
refine it, or distill it. People who have become alcoholics will skip the weaker fermented
alcohols like beer, wine or cider and stick to the hard distilled stuff like Whiskey,
Gin and Vodka. Have a couple beers and you might be kind of a jerk, but for most people
it’s not until they start doing shots that they’ll make a real ass of themselves, black
out or end up in the hospital. In each of these examples, the result of refinement
is a higher concentration of a particular ingredient that will have an effect on your
brain’s reward system. What happens is the substance either occupies your dopamine receptors
or causes dopamine to be released and it makes you feel good. That is- you get more bang
for your buck. Distilled alcohol means you get drunker for a lot less liquid, and cocaine
and heroin give you way more of the feel good effects from just a tiny bit of the substance. This brings us to sugar, another substance
which also affects your brain’s dopamine system, and is also the result of a refining
process. With sugar, you’re getting more sweet for your buck. And compared to other
tastes, sweet activates your reward center even more- that is, evolution programmed us
to seek sweet foods in particular. One of the reasons is that sweet foods in nature
are very rarely poisonous. Another fun thing about sugar is that it actually
has a small opiate like effect. When newborns are to be circumcised, they are given a pacifier
dipped in something called “sweet ease”- which is just a concentrated sugar solution.
The sugar activates the endogenous opioid system, providing enough analgesia for the
baby that the procedure can be completed without too much fuss. And then, how much something is refined should
give you an idea of how intense you can expect the effects to be. For example, 100 kilograms
of coca leaves will get you about 300 - 1200 grams of cocaine. That is - the resulting
material is about 100 times stronger than what you started with. When it comes to sugar,
for a good yielding sugarcane, about half the weight of one stalk is juice, and 20%
of that juice is actual sugar. So the result of the refinement process is a material that’s
around 10 times sweeter than what you started with. The average American consumes about 82 grams
of sugar per day. To naturally consume this much sugar, they would have to chew through
about 2 lbs of sugarcane. This is 2 lbs of fiber rich plant material that our bodies
would normally expect to come along with all that sweetness. The fiber in there slows the
rate at which the sugar is released into your system, so without the fiber the sugar is
absorbed very rapidly. This is another parallel to cocaine.
Your body could probably handle chewing through a 100 grams of coca leaves because the active
ingredient is released very slowly into your system... However if you slam that amount
of active ingredient instantaneously via your right nostril then it’s gonna be a shock
to your body. OK, so sugar has some parallels to narcotics,
but how is it actually addictive? In animals at least, sugar addiction has been thoroughly
proven. However, establishing addiction in people is a little different. According to
the APA Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 3 of the following 7 criteria need to be met. 5 of these criteria are considered psychological
and they are: Bingeing on the substance, a desire to quit using the substance, craving
or seeking the substance, the substance interfering with your daily life, and continued use of
the substance despite negative consequences. The other two criteria are considered physiological,
which makes them the most important in establishing addiction. They are Tolerance and Withdrawal. Tolerance is easier to establish objectively
since you can use neuro imaging to actually see it. What’s happening in the brain when
you become tolerant to something is that the dopamine receptors in your brain get downregulated,
so more dopamine is necessary to get the same effect - essentially you need more of the
substance to get the same amount of pleasure. If you take a look at a cocaine addicts brain,
you can see that the cocaine has clearly downregulated their dopamine receptors. Then, if you look
at the brain of someone who frequently over consumes sugar, you see the exact same thing
in their brain. This is tolerance. And what about withdrawal? People who try
to quit sugar consistently report symptoms like lightheadedness, headaches, anxiety,
mood swings, muscle aches, general fatigue, and physical tremors or “the shakes”.
If you’ve seen Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize me!” you may remember this scene: “I was
feeling bad, in the car. Feeling like shit. Started eating - feel great. Feel really good
now. I feel so good it’s crazy.” So what’s happening here is he’s having withdrawal
symptoms until he gets the food again. And what is almost every one of McDonald’s products
loaded with? Sugar, or High fructose corn syrup which is chemically almost identical
to sugar. In this documentary “That Sugar Film” Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau
goes on an experimental high sugar diet for 30 days. Despite consuming the same amount
of calories and just upping his sugar intake, in these 30 days alone he gained 8.5 kilograms
(19 lbs) And by the 18th day he already had developed fatty liver disease. When he finally
goes off the diet, he talks about his withdrawal symptoms: “Frankly, it didn’t feel that
different from giving up cigarettes. I had headaches, I was moody, and my sleep patterns
were terrible. Woke up, very early, and as soon as I was awake I kind of.. I’m craving
sugar.” As paracelsus said, “the dose makes the
poison.” So if you’re not someone who’s eating candy or drinking soda on a regular
basis, you might not be worried about all of this. However, the real issue is that a
lot of people could be over dosing on sugar without even realizing it. Ever since the
low fat craze, our food supply has become more and more overrun with added sugars and
now 80% of our food has sugar added to it. One of the reasons is that if you take the
fat out of something, it tastes like garbage. If you’re a food company looking to maximize
your profit, your product needs to appeal health conscious consumers and it needs to
taste good. So, you take the fat out of the product so you can market it as low fat and
then you put sugar in where the fat was so it still tastes good. In fact, food companies found out that you
can make almost anything taste better by putting some sugar in it. The “Bliss Point” is
a term the food industry uses to describe the point at which a product is most likeable
for the majority of consumers. And the majority of consumers like more sugar than less. So
the Bliss Point is going to be the point at which the maximum amount of sugar has been
added before the product becomes too sweet. This includes anything from bread to pizza
sauce to salad dressing. Sugar used to be way more expensive than it
is nowadays - way back in 1319 it sold for about 50 dollars a pound, but as sugar cane
and sugar beet cultivation improved and the refinement process became more advanced, sugar
became significantly cheaper. Then things got really cheap with the advent of high fructose
corn syrup, which again is almost identical to sugar. Because of the way subsidies are
managed in the United States, we end up with a massive amount of corn. In 2010, 32 percent
of the world’s corn supply, 63.9 billion dollars worth, came from US farmers. That’s
a lot of corn. No wonder this corn derived sweetener is in almost everything. High fructose corn syrup and sugar have built
up a bad reputation over time, but there’s 54 other names for sugar that the food industry
can use to have us feeling better about their products while keeping the sugar in. This is how even the more health conscious
people can end up consuming more than twice the daily recommended intake of sugar without
even knowing it. And now we have the question: are you addicted
to sugar? If you’re like most people, you’re fulfilling your cravings at almost every meal
without even knowing it, so how could you tell? With something like caffeine, you can
take a pretty good guess about whether or not you have some dependence on it. You can
just go without a coffee for a while and see how you feel. However, with sugar, it will
take some deliberation and careful label reading to properly cut it out from your diet. But I really recommend you do trying cutting
it out so you can know how you feel without it. It’s important to know whether or not
you are dependent on this stuff, because as I’ll discuss in my next video, sugar has
some particularly negative effects on your health. “Disease doesn’t happen with one meal,
but it happens with a thousand. But that’s what we have because now sugar is with EVERY
meal.” If you liked this, make sure to check out
these other two videos on health and maybe even consider supporting me on Patreon.
I was already aware of the sugar vs cocaine with mice experiment and always wondered, what if the mice liked the sugar water more because the cocaine water would surely taste like shit?
Does anybody know if the taste was controlled for?
sweet vid.
>but muh free market will correct for this because consumers will demand more products that don't have added sugar!
big food corporations really have committed crimes against humanity. they must pay