Why Do We Crave Sugar?
Our Honestly Healthy Hero and resident nutritionist Libby Limon talks sugar and sugar addiction…….. This year the media hooked on to the ‘big bad sugar debate’. Although this is not news to most people – even as a kid you knew that sweets weren’t good for you!! We are now bombarded with ‘healthy’ sugar alternatives, but what makes us have a sweet tooth to begin with, why do we crave sugar? Understanding this can help you figure out how the best way is to reduce it in your diet? Sugar is an addictive substance, the more you have the more you want. This works on three levels;
- Firstly is taste, your taste buds develop a ‘sweet tooth’ but become desensitised so need more sugar to have the same taste of sweetness.
- Secondly, sugars can trigger ‘pleasure’ sensors in the brain triggering a feeling of wellbeing via production of your brain's natural opioids. We have sweet receptors (two protein receptors located on your tongue), which evolved in ancestral times when the diet was very low in sugar, and high energy source food was an aide for survival.
- Lastly and probably the most important and enlightening is the body’s need for energy and the mechanism by which the blood must maintain homeostasis or balanced blood sugar levels. The graph here demonstrates this. Looking at the red line to begin with. When you eat something that is made up of sugars (carbohydrate) the digestive system breaks this down into simple sugar molecules and absorbs it in the blood stream. If this happens quickly your blood sugar goes too high so the body produces insulin in order to reduce the sugar level back down to healthy range by storing the ‘energy’ for use later. Unfortunately this can then lead to low blood sugar which triggers the release of the stress hormone cortisol as well cause cravings and energy dips (think that post lunch slump!). This means that you reach for more sugary calories instead of using the already stored ones.