Reality of Sugar Addiction + How to Kick the Habit

 

Click HERE to Discover these 80 Keto-Friendly and Healthy Slow Cooker Recipes

Everyone looks for a sweet fix now and then, but are you really addicted to sugar? Here’s how to tell if your sweet tooth is a real problem, and how to quit for good.

Sugar is addictive, fattening, inflammatory, and void of nutrients. However, we overlook sugar’s poorest qualities because it seems harmless, and for the most part, is socially acceptable.

Yet sugar addiction is a legitimate problem and can wreck havoc on your health. So, how do we know when it’s too much?

Is Sugar Really “Addictive”?

While referring to sugar as “addictive” is controversial, research shows that sugar does have an addictive response in the brain.This is because sugar influences dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is part of the reward loop in the brain. When you eat sugar, you feel good, which makes you want to eat even more.

As the pattern continues for you to get those feel-good hits, the brain begins to release lower levels of dopamine because it assumes you’re going to continue getting the steady stream of supplementation.

The problem for many people who’ve come to rely on sugar as their dopamine booster is that “moderation” isn’t possible, and so, like many other addiction rehab programs, it does need to be an “all or nothing” approach.

This is where quitting sugar begins to feel nearly as hard as quitting smoking or other forms of addictive substances. When you quit, the dopamine hit from your sugar intake isn’t there, but the brain can’t make more dopamine fast enough.

As a result, you feel down, perhaps even depressed and fatigued, and your brain begins to send out cravings for sugar because it is well-acquainted with the fact that sugar has been your dopamine booster.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that sugar is good for you – there are far better ways to maintain healthy dopamine levels. Still, handling the cravings when you quit sugar becomes a battle of will. As a sugar detox coach, I’ve seen people succumb to their cravings over and over, only to have a much harder time trying to quit the next time.

An even bigger problem with sugar is that it’s basically 100 percent socially acceptable – and when you do try to quit, people think you’re crazy. “Why aren’t you eating sugar?” “Sweets aren’t that bad for you!” “Just eat it in moderation!”

The problem for many people who’ve come to rely on sugar as their dopamine booster is that “moderation” isn’t possible, and so, like many other addiction rehab programs, it does need to be an “all or nothing” approach.

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The Damaging Effects of Sugar

The detrimental effects of sugar are well-proven by research. Sugar has been proven to be problematic for:

• Cardiovascular disease, increasing the risk for heart attack significantly
• Obesity and weight management
• Acne and other skin imbalances and disorders
• Type II diabetes and insulin/glucose problems
• Increased cancer risk
• Depression
• Premature aging
• Increased levels of fatigue
• Liver problems and disease
• Inflammation
• Kidney problems and disease
• Cavities and periodontal disease
• Dementia and Alzheimer’s

This list is far from exhaustive. Sugar has the potential to damage every system in the body, down to the cellular level.

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7 Signs You Might Have a Sugar Problem

For some, sugar can be eaten in moderation when rounded out with a healthy intake of vegetables, protein, and healthy fats. If you eat a significant amount of vegetables, say, 10 cups per day, a small amount of sugar once in a while will barely make a dent in your overall health, unless you have prevailing or chronic health issues.

But if you barely eat any vegetables, and you eat a diet high in carbohydrates already, then any amount of sugar you add is not in moderation to the rest of your macronutrient intake.

When people say that they eat sugar “in moderation”, they often mean in moderation of itself. Instead of having four sodas a day like they used to, they cut back and have only two instead.

When you’re reducing sugar intake, you also have to boost the things that counter the negative effects it has, like eating more vegetables and omega-3 fatty acids.

So how do you know if you have a sugar problem, and if you need to eat it in moderation or not at all?

You may need to quit sugar completely for a significant amount of time if one or more of the following is true:

You have sugar every single day and start to have cravings/withdrawal feelings within a few hours of missing a typical sugary treat.

You turn to sugar-filled sweets to handle stress.

You think about sugar all the time.

You get immediate headaches if you’re a few hours late in having a typical sugary treat.

You eat sugar daily, but get less than 2 cups of vegetables per day.

You are overweight and eat a high-carb diet.

You have thyroid or other hormone problems and rely on a daily “sugar hit” to ward off depression or sadness, usually in the evenings.

If you can relate to any of the above statements or scenarios, then you may need to make some dramatic changes to alter your dependence on sugar.

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3 Steps to Beat a Sugar Addiction

When it comes to quitting sugar, it can feel like an impossible battle. But there are ways to set yourself up for success and to minimize feelings of withdrawal.

1. Eat your nutrients first.

Before you quit sugar cold turkey, you need to boost the nutrients in your diet that will help to support a balanced gut, which will help to minimize sugar cravings and feelings of withdrawal.

While some cravings are produced from the brain’s reliance on sugar for dopamine, other cravings are derived from gut microbes that rely on sugar to survive. In the gut, there is a complex balance of good-to-bad bacteria, and the bad guys rely heavily on sugar, junk foods, and processed carbs.

When you cut these out, the gut bacteria send out strong cravings because it’s literally do-or-die for them. When you understand that cravings are produced as a physiological response within your body – and not only from an emotional need or dependence on it – it becomes easier to mentally fight them.

To pre-support your body’s liberation from sugar, boost fermented foods and add in gut-healing and nourishing items like collagen, bone broth, and plenty of vegetables.

Omega-3 fatty acids, like those found in salmon and sardines, are also essential for combating inflammation. Do this for at least a week before you plan to quit sugar.

2. Incorporate dopamine-boosting activities into your routine.

While your brain might be accustomed to getting regular boosts of dopamine from your sweet tooth, there are many other ways to get a healthier fix.

Try one or more of these natural ways increase dopamine levels:

• Increase your protein intake and eat more of it throughout the day, including for breakfast

• Take a daily probiotic supplement

• Walk (or do another aerobic exercise) for 10-20 minutes daily

• Create and stick to a healthy sleep routine, with seven to eight hours of sleep each night

• Listen to music, play an instrument, or otherwise engage the right-brained creative center of your brain

• Practice meditation

• Get natural sunlight and outdoor exposure regularly

3. Quit cold turkey.

After you’ve boosted the nutrients and habits that you need to replace your sugar-dopamine connection, it’s time to quit for good. For someone who’s truly addicted to sugar, weaning off too slowly will rarely work.

When you’re quitting sugar, you need to quit all forms, and that even includes natural forms of sweeteners like honey and coconut sugar, and in most cases, regular use of stevia.

Even though stevia doesn’t impact blood sugar, for true sugar addicts, stevia can perpetuate the dependence because it still tells the brain it’s getting a sugar hit.

While you don’t have to quit forever, three to six weeks is needed to break the daily reliance on sugar. As they say, it takes 21 days to create a habit, so you need to be completely free from it for at least that long.

 But if you have serious sugar dependence issues or health problems you want to address, longer or even permanent sugar removal is a better approach. Once you’ve removed the initial supply from your life, cravings will go away.

If you find that you’re having trouble sticking to a no-sugar plan, find someone to be your accountability partner, or seek professional nutritional support.

Watch this video – How to Break Sugar Addiction: 7 Steps to Help You Stop Eating Sugar

Written by Aimee McNew

Author Bio:

Aimee McNew is a Certified Nutritionist who specializes in women’s health, thyroid problems, infertility, and digestive wellness. She ate her way back to health using a Paleo diet, lost 80 pounds, and had a healthy baby after numerous miscarriages. She focuses on simple nutrition practices that promote long-lasting results.

A lot of people have gotten results from the Keto diet, and enjoyed the foods that it has to offer. However, many of the people who are following this diet have a hard time finding the recipes that they need, especially ones that are quick and easy to complete.

Fortunately, Kelsey Ale, noticed this problem, and decided to do something about it. She’s found that making recipes in a slow cooker gives you meals which are not only delicious, but also take very little time to make. Mostly you just put a few simple ingredients in the slow cooker, and let it do the rest.

To find out more, click on – Keto Slow Cooker Cookbook

How Excess Sugar May Increase Your Risk of Alzheimer’s

 

Click HERE to Discover these 80 Keto-Friendly and Healthy Slow Cooker Recipes

Are Alzheimer’s and sugar linked somehow? Read on to find out how excess sugar may increase your risk of dementia.

Even if you’re actively trying to decrease your sugar consumption, beware — conventional food companies quietly add sugar to nearly every food, making it hard to buy even a jar of tomato sauce without added sweetness.

At the same time, Alzheimer’s rates have been skyrocketing along with obesity and the underlying metabolic syndrome. This may seem like a coincidence, but data suggests there could be a link between excess sugar and Alzheimer’s disease . Since Alzheimer’s is the third leading cause of death in the United States, this is a very alarming issue.

Dr Perlmutter, author of the best-selling book Grain Brain, suggests there are a wide variety of neurological issues attributing to the standard Western diet. Additionally, Harvard University’s Dr. Emily Deans suggests new evidence pointing to correlations between the standard Western diet and smaller brain size.

While there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, a small UCLA study recently revealed how partial memory loss could be reversed. How did researchers do this? By following a Paleo-like template. This landmark study and its supporting data continues to notion that a high-carb/ high-sugar diet may not be good for a a person’s mental health.

And without mental health, what kind of health can we really have?

How Does Alzheimer’s Happen?

One in ten people over age the age of 65 have Alzheimer’s—and those numbers are increasing. As the baby boomers age (the first generation with a high sugar diet for most of their life) the more Alzheimer’s disease grows. From a science perspective, Alzheimer’s is typically seen via problems with memory, judgment, and thinking.

Memory loss and dementia increases with Alzheimer’s and is a result of your brain malfunctioning. While there are some medications to help with symptoms, there is no cure. Genetics play a large factor in Alzheimer’s, but it seems that epigenetics (i.e. your diet and lifestyle) also play a major part in the disease development.

Mechanistically, plaques and tangles appear in the brain and lead to problematic buildups. Scientists are still debating what exactly causes Alzheimer’s, but there are a few different hypotheses.

One of the first guesses was the cholinergic hypothesis, which suggests that the disease was caused by a reduced synthesis of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.

Unfortunately, drugs designed to target this area have not been very successful. Others suggest that mechanisms of cholinergic effects result in large buildup of amyloid, which may lead to an “inflamed brain.”

The most plausible theory describes Alzheimer’s deriving from the amyloid precursor protein binding to a death receptor 6 (DR6) — often found in the affected brain areas.

How Does Sugar Factor In?

So, how does sugar play a role in brain disease? For one, the pathways of diabetes development seem to affect how Alzheimer’s will occur. It also tells us that too much sugar leads to diabetes and is a major red flag.

Some scientific experts believe that burning too much glucose may cause disruption in your brain. This is also why approaches like the UCLA Alzheimer’s study, where a lower-sugar diet was consumed, seem to work—at least so far.

In fact, Alzheimer’s disease was named “type 3 diabetes” because your brain can produce insulin, as well. The catch? Your brain cells need this insulin to survive. And if disruption occurs, your brain cells are at risk.

What Does The Evidence Say?

A 2013 study in The New England Journal Of Medicine found that higher glucose levels may be a risk factor for dementia—even among people without diabetes. Thus, you would never know you were at risk for Alzheimer’s. Additionally, other studies confirm that insulin resistance links to significantly lower cerebral glucose metabolism.

Another red flag is the fact that diabetics lose gray matter more than those who do not suffer from diabetes. Why is this important? This loss of gray matter is a contributing cause of Alzheimer’s.

And if we refer back to Dr. Emily Dean’s article, we will see that there is now evidence that a Western diet is linked to a smaller hippocampus—one of the areas in your brain most affected by Alzheimer’s. Things aren’t looking good for a high-sugar diet here.

Another study from 2013 claims that obesity, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer’s sum up the overall situation by suggesting that: “the incidence of type 2 diabetes has increased dramatically over the last decades mainly due to Western lifestyle factors such as lack of exercise and high calorie diets”.

Similar studies suggest that Alzheimer’s is related to sugar and concludes that: “High-sugar diets are thought to promote weight gain and insulin resistance predisposing to type 2 diabetes.

To aggravate this scenario, it has been consistently shown that type 2 diabetes is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and both disorders share similar demographic profiles, risk factors, and clinical and biochemical features (e.g. insulin resistance).”

The risk for Alzheimer’s increases with diets rich in sugar. Remember—just because your don’t have diabetes, doesn’t mean you’re not at risk for Alzheimer’s. In fact, one of the best preventative measures for developing Alzheimer’s is switching to a low-sugar Paleo approach.

Watch this video – Understanding sugar’s effect on the brain, ADHD, Alzheimer’s, high blood pressure and diabetes

The Bottom Line

There are plenty of reasons to avoid sugar. However, the neurological risk seems to be the best reason. Since we still don’t completely understand Alzheimer’s disease, it makes sense to take every precaution to avoid the disease.

Industries and politics cause big problems when companies like Coca-Cola spend big money on ads convincing us to consume large amounts of sugar.

If it becomes well-known that sugar can cause brain damage, the economic implications are obvious. Whether you are genetically at risk for Alzheimer’s or not, you should take precautions to avoid developing it. Cutting out the sugar should be step one.

Written by Casey Thaler

Author Bio:

Casey Thaler, B.A., NASM-CPT, FNS is an NASM® certified personal trainer and NASM® certified fitness nutrition specialist. He writes for Paleo Magazine®, The Paleo Diet® and Greatist®. He is also an advisor for Kettle and Fire and runs his own nutrition and fitness consulting company, Eat Clean, Train Clean®.

A lot of people have gotten results from the Keto diet, and enjoyed the foods that it has to offer. However, many of the people who are following this diet have a hard time finding the recipes that they need, especially ones that are quick and easy to complete.

Fortunately, Kelsey Ale, noticed this problem, and decided to do something about it. She’s found that making recipes in a slow cooker gives you meals which are not only delicious, but also take very little time to make. Mostly you just put a few simple ingredients in the slow cooker, and let it do the rest.

To find out more, click on – Keto Slow Cooker Cookbook