Why do people get sugar cravings? I have discovered that sugar is addictive.
I try to eat less than the daily recommended amount of sugar, by not purchasing sugary products. My CLIF Builder bars have 23g each, so I limit myself to eating only one bar per day. So there’s no room for sugar in my drinks. None.
Sugar Cravings
I recently went to an event that included lunch and some desserts. I took one small brownie square with my meal. Afterwards, I went back for another brownie square. And then another brownie square. These were not normal brownies. They kind of looked like brownies, but they were caked in sugar.
I got sugar cravings after eating just one of these brownies!
Sugar Cravings Causes
Evidence reveals sugar can be addictive. Experts say moderation is not the best option — elimination is.
Good brownies contain minimal salt and almost no sugar.
Eating sugar and processed foods creates a vicious cycle spurred on by addiction.
The third stage of addiction, craving, occurs when motivation is enhanced, usually after an abstinence period (Vanderschuren and Everitt, 2005, Weiss, 2005). “Craving” remains a poorly defined term that is often used to describe the intense desire to self-administer drugs in humans (Wise, 1988). For lack of a better word, we will use the term “craving” as defined by increased efforts to obtain a substance of abuse or its associated cues as a result of addiction and abstinence. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/
Even a diet of sugar from high fructose corn syrup will promote a sugar addition.
High fructose corn syrup also promotes a number of other maladies, including:
- Cancer
- Obesity
- Kidney stones (calcium oxalate stones)
- and many more bad health conditions
So sugar cravings are caused by eating sugary foods and drinks, foods you crave, adrenal fatigue, monthly hormonal changes in women, parasites, Candida, and bacterial overgrowth.
Dr. Mercola and Gary Taubes on The Case Against Sugar Video
Gary Taubes:
It’s also known that sugar induces similar responses in the “reward centers” of the human brain as other additive substances, like nicotine, cocaine, heroin and alcohol. The 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program even recommends consuming sweets in lieu of alcohol to ward off a craving for a drink.
Today, “Sugar has become an ingredient in prepared and packaged foods so ubiquitous it can only be avoided by concerted and determined effort,” Taubes wrote, which is, of course, precisely the problem, especially as realization grows that simply “moderating” sugar may not be enough. Taubes continued:17
“The traditional response to the how-little-is-too-much question is that we should eat sugar in moderation — not eat too much of it. But we only know we’re consuming too much when we’re getting fatter or manifesting other symptoms of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome … Any discussion of how little sugar is too much also has to account for the possibility that sugar is a drug and perhaps addictive.
Trying to consume sugar in moderation, however it’s defined, in a world in which substantial sugar consumption is the norm and virtually unavoidable, is likely to be no more successful for some of us than trying to smoke cigarettes in moderation — just a few a day, rather than a whole pack … If sugar consumption is a slippery slope, then advocating moderation is not a meaningful concept.”