Scientists often view anecdotal evidence with suspicion. What happens in laboratories is given more weight than reports from everyday people about things that happen in real life (referred to as “self-reported” evidence, and often taken with a large grain of salt). But perhaps the idea of sugar’s addictiveness was first taken seriously because the anecdotal evidence was so overwhelming. For hundreds of years, the world has contained millions of people who have deliberately given up sugar, with varying degrees of success.
One particular shared experience has generated much of the anecdotal evidence about the addictive properties of sugar: Lent. Many Christians observe the liturgical season of Lent, the 40 days leading up to Easter, when they try to quit something that is very hard to give up. What are the top ten choices for sacrificial deprivation? According to the Twitter Lent Tracker, which counted more than 125,000 responses, the top ten are:
school
chocolate
alcohol
social networking
swearing
soda
sweets
fast food
coffee
Okay, some of the answers are facetious—like giving up school. But as separate entities, chocolate, soda, and sweets are all predominant, along with fast food, which accounts for a lot of gratuitous sugar. Plenty more finds its way into coffee cups. When looked at by genre, food is the overall top category.
Historically, sweets would have been the obvious frill for people to give up, because they did not have a wealth of other choices. Throughout the two millennia since Christianity took hold, most people in most places have experienced not abundance but scarcity. When deciding what to give up for several weeks, they did not have a wide variety of luxuries from which to pick.
This has been especially true for children, who have always had a narrower range of available pleasures than adults. Most kids already did not swear, gamble, or smoke. What else but candy was there for them to give up?
The Science
It turns out, scientific research backs up anecdotes about the difficulty of giving up sugar. Jordan Gaines Lewis explained for The Conversation how the mesolimbic pathway operates.
When we do something pleasurable, a bundle of neurons called the ventral tegmental area uses the neurotransmitter dopamine to signal to a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens…
Like drugs, sugar spikes dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. Over the long term, regular sugar consumption actually changes the gene expression and availability of dopamine receptors in both the midbrain and frontal cortex…
Regular sugar consumption also inhibits the action of the dopamine transporter, a protein which pumps dopamine out of the synapse and back into the neuron after firing.
When confronted with sugar, part of the brain shrugs and asks, “What’s not to like?” We can prevail only by making determined use of other brain areas—the ones that think. A large percentage of the world’s inhabitants have come to know, first-hand, the difficulty of living without sugar. This is why so many clamorous, insistent voices can be heard affirming that it is indeed an addictive substance.
Your responses and feedback are welcome!
Source: “2015 Twitter Lent Tracker,” OpenBible.info, 02/15/15
Source: “Here’s what happens to your brain when you give up sugar for Lent,” The Conversation.com, 02/18/15
Image by Jeanny