The Trouble with Sugar

Something's happening outside. I think it's like a saw blade or something One of those wait hang on is it the vacuum lady? Oh, no, it's the fucking leaf blower Would You like to kick us off. I spent hours thinking of one and I could not come up with a good one I was gonna say god knows we've had the fucking time in the lead up to this episode I have postponed this one two times. I think that makes this one worse You don't want people to know how much time you have I actually had time to think about it Welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that spikes your glycemic index No, no, we're talking about today like glycosis This is I will say an argument that I have that is ongoing with a member of my family who says I can feel that that spikes my glycemic index and My response to him is the glycemic index is a document. So what you're saying is like my dictionary hurts Oh Can't believe you're about to tell me that some piece of health information is false I feel betrayed I am Michael Hobbs. I am Aubrey Gordon if you would like to support the show We're back to tiny repeating machine. I'm trying to do it alongside you If you would like to support the show you can get t-shirts mugs tote bags all manner of things at T public You can subscribe at patreon or at Apple podcasts. They're the same audio audio and today Michael Aubrey we are talking about Myths about sugar take me on a journey. There are so many places this can go I am a bursting with things to tell you are bursting you all you've texted in the last like two weeks is like I'm excited I'm excited. I can't tell you any of the things Yeah, but like I definitely had a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday And she was like is this gonna be about the fucking rat study again Oh, like I've been yelling at my friends about the stuff that I have been learning Non-stop to the point that they are tired of it the little sugar rats the little sugar rats I'm excited to meet them. So we're gonna focus on Three big ideas one the idea that sugar makes kids hyperactive. Okay, two that we can predict how different foods impact most people's blood sugar, okay, and three that sugar is addictive and Particularly the claim that gets made most frequently is sugar is as addictive as cocaine This is a discourse that has been around for a while, which I have complicated thoughts on so I'm excited to get into this So Michael I thought that we should start with a little conversation about what sugar is please do I Went to my favorite as you know cafe gratitude Oh, yeah, God Los Angeles And they had a key lime pie that they were like it's raw and it's sugar-free and I was like Oh, how do you sweeten it and they were like maple syrup? And I was like that is not sugar-free I remember reading somewhere that anything you see on the Ingredients list that ends with oce like dextrose sucrose Lictose Nactose. It's all sugars. They hide sugar in the ingredients lists as like evaporated cane juice Yeah, absolutely. This is also where we get the idea that like agave is like better for you quote-unquote So when people think about sugar they think about those images of like a Coke bottle and then a bunch of teaspoons full of white granulated sugar, right folks are thinking of sugar you put in your coffee It is worth noting that multiple kinds of sugar exist and all of them exist naturally Glucose occurs naturally in honey agave and fruit especially dried fruit It can also occur in cured meats like salami Because they will use a salt and sugar pack to draw the moisture of the meat, right? Fructose is a sugar that's found in fruits and vegetables Lactose is the sugar that's found in dairy. Oh, yeah, maltose is a sugar that is found in sprouting grains There's also logos Ethos Yes, so different sugars are processed differently Glucose for example is absorbed through your intestines and directly into your bloodstream Fructose on the other hand is processed in your liver and doesn't appear to increase blood sugar or create the same kind of insulin response as glucose does So different sugars operate differently according to Harvard quote for most people one type of sugar isn't better than another this entire episode is a cafe gratitude sub tweet I'm still mad about this Michael every episode of the show Dude I quit eating all sugars after I watched that YouTube video. This was in like 2011 or something. I don't know this YouTube video that you're talking about. Oh the Robert Lustig one sugar the bitter truth I know about Lustig but I haven't seen the video I watched it and then I was like, okay for a month I'm gonna try like eating no sugar. So like no berries No desserts and like I did in fact lose a bunch of weight and then the minute I started eating sugar again I gained it all back just like everything. Okay great Just like everything It's like I don't know what the point of that was I was trying to think of a name Like what would be the name for the Robert Lustig video and the closest I came up with was an inconvenient tooth That's a way better That would have to be about the dental effects, you know Okay, are you ready to dive in to our first big cultural idea about sugar give me rats No Okay, so first up we're gonna talk about the idea that sugar makes kids hyperactive. Yes, I Grew up believing this. I mean, this is something kind of like in the background of like don't feed the kids sugar Cuz they'll be like ramped up all day, which totally I gotta say anecdotally like really feels true Almost all of these really ride the coattails of it feels true Like that's how this stuff gets as far as it does Mm-hmm. This one was huge when we were coming up and it's only gotten bigger in the years since there are some schools now That have rules about only bringing sugar-free snacks. Oh interesting. Okay the first time we hear in scientific literature a connection between sugar and behavior is 1922 Okay, the idea was first floated in a paper that was looking for dietary causes of behavioral issues It suggested that sugar consumption could lead to becoming quote the neurotic child. Oh From there it genuinely just kind of sat on a shelf for 50 years It didn't really go anywhere people weren't super concerned about it. It didn't really hang on until it resurfaced in the 1970s when researchers started looking into ADHD Oh the biggest boost that this idea gets is in a book called why your child is hyperactive by dr. Ben Feingold and Ben Feingold creates the Feingold diet and writes this book about children and hyperactivity and both of those books really point the finger at sugar artificial sweeteners and artificial additives The Washington Post actually wrote an obituary of dr. Feingold that includes a pretty good Synopsis and I am going to my greeting send it to you. I get to do my little audiobook voice Dr. Feingold proposed that at least half of the children diagnosed as hyperactive would be helped if they eliminated Factory produced soft drinks cake candy pudding process cheeses and luncheon meats He also said foods such as cucumbers and many fruits containing Salicyl cell cell cell cell cellates Contributed to hyperactivity as did tea mint and wintergreen. That's a gum Treatment of hyperactive children with amphetamines was doubtful therapy and should be used only as last resort So this is this dumb shit where it's like it's not the like very well established Thing that your child has been diagnosed with it's like his diet. Yeah, it's like taking baths to cure autism shit It is sort of mobilizing parental discomfort with the idea of giving your kids drugs And it is sort of giving folks who have that discomfort somewhere else to go with it And that place to go with it is no soda no cake no cucumbers cucumbers right tea fuck you tea Someone's finally saying it the idea essentially was that eating sugar triggered insulin spikes Which led to adrenaline spikes and hyperactivity But the data was regarded with some Skepticism by other scientists because it was pretty weak right yeah fine gold's book wasn't based on Randomized controlled trials it wasn't based on meta-analyses. It wasn't really based on any Hard and fast research it was based mostly on his own Anecdotal observations in his own clinical practice as a pediatric Allergist yeah, so the fix is kind of in on fine gold's work starting in the 80s in earnest There's a 1983 research review in the Journal of Learning Disabilities on this idea of sort of quote-unquote the fine gold hypothesis They looked at 23 studies and found that quote diet modification is not an effective intervention for hyperactivity as Evidenced by the negligible treatment effects, which are only slightly greater than those expected by chance of course We also get a research review in 1986 that finds that quote although the results of correlational studies suggested that high levels of sugar consumption may be Associated with increased rates of inappropriate behavior the results of dietary challenge studies have been inconsistent and inconclusive Most studies have failed to find any effects associated with sugar ingestion and the few studies that have found effects Have been as likely to find sugar improving behavior as making it worse So does this mean the entire idea of like sugar highs and sugar making kids Hyperactive is based on this idea that it causes ADHD that is sort of the root of it, right? And then it becomes more generalized It sort of seeps out it leeches out into culture more broadly and folks develop this association that is like any High energy or frankly just like irritating behavior from kids. Yeah is likely a result of any sugar They may have eaten. Hmm. So we get these couple of sort of research reviews and people are like, I don't know about this, right? But there is a moment when you talk to people who know ADHD research and who knows sugar research Mm-hmm. If you ask them when this was debunked, they will say 1994. Oh, yeah 1994 there's a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine They're looking at both sucrose or sugar and Aspartame the sample size is half preschool age kids who are three to five and half Elementary school age kids who are six to ten All of the kids involved are described by their parents as being quote-unquote sensitive to sugar. Okay kids and their families followed three different diets for three weeks each One was high in sugar, but had no artificial sweeteners One was low in sugar, but used Aspartame as a sweetener One was low in sugar and used a placebo. They used saccharin as their sweetener. Okay essentially what they did was clear out these families cupboards and Replace them with totally new food each week. So it's a home invasion, but in reverse. Yep, totally They're putting things in they also found a way to test whether or not people were sticking to the diet Okay, they added a high amounts of a sorbic acid to the Aspartame Which is vitamin C and they added high levels of riboflavin To the sucrose. Oh, and they pee tested people Oh, it all comes out on your pee and then they would be like, okay, you really did it or you really didn't do in addition to that They also took fasting blood work They did behavioral assessment and they did cognitive assessment every week of this experiment It is kind of funny to me that they think having a good methodology will prevent like the woo woo weirdos online from still being like Are you ready for their findings? Yes, I think that it's it's the cucumbers Didn't cut out cucumbers They found that neither sugar nor Aspartame quote Adversely affects the behavior or cognitive functioning of children. Okay, but they also found this quote Cognitive or behavioral differences were as likely to be found between sham diets as they were between Experimental diets and the few differences associated with the ingestion of sucrose were more consistent with a slight calming effect than with hyperactivity interesting so like a People were reporting bigger differences around the fake made-up diets. They're like cosmetic changes Yeah, and B if there was any effect, it wasn't really statistically significant But it appeared that it was actually like chilling kids out a tiny bit So give kids sugar if you want them to calm down Yeah, exactly Around the same time there is an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine From Dr. Marcel Kinsborne who's a pediatric neurologist and says that actually like this is kind of a chicken or the egg situation Right like does sugar consumption make you less inhibited or does disinhibition lead to an increase in sugar consumption? Right, right, and ultimately Dr. Kinsborne includes this pretty like Mike dropy quote He says there is no evidence that sugar alone can turn a child with normal attention into a hyperactive child The same applies to aspartame which has also been suspected of causing behavior disorders in some children sugar clearly does not induce Psychopathology where there was none before but it may on occasion aggravate an existing behavior disorder Sugar-free diets can be burdensome and socially inhibiting and they should not be endorsed purely on the basis of anecdotal evidence So basically there might be some conditions that maybe your kid has that makes them hyperactive But at the population level we just can't say that there's any link between sugar and hyperactive behavior or like Hyperactive disorders or other like mental condition right at this point We're talking about ten years of research reviews RCTs all of this kind of stuff that keep looking for this link and keep not finding it, right? I remember reading a super fascinating study years ago on the effects of alcohol We often think that things like you know bar fights are kind of the way that people act when they're drunk in Western societies we think of those as like the biological effects of alcohol But what this study pointed out was that alcohol Effects are actually very cultural and there's some societies where it leads to a ton of violence And there's some societies where it doesn't like where it's like I love you man kind of drink totally and what they said was basically There's like societal expectations about how to behave when you're drunk that actually affect your behavior when you're drunk And I do wonder if there's something like that was sugar. I remember as a kid I was always told that like sugar will make you hyperactive Yeah, so maybe it did make me hyperactive because somewhere in my brain. It was like you just had some sugar You should not hyperactive now. I mean Michael you are handing me a segue on a silver platter Most of the explanations that they're now exploring for this are social One of them is that this is it as you noted a self-fulfilling prophecy parents express so much anxiety about kids Behavior around sugar that it cues kids to act that way children are basically that horse that tapped its foot to do math horse math Like that is one of the possible explanations here Another of the possible explanations is like think about where you're getting sugar when you're a kid It's usually birthday parties celebrations right gatherings if you have ever seen a child at a birthday party You know that emotions run high. Yeah, that's not sugar. That's children but one of the most popular explanations for this is that it may actually be a response to restriction of sugar oh one dietitian told the New York Times quote the psychological effect of food restriction Cannot be overstated when we restrict children's access to sugar They are naturally going to become more preoccupied with and drawn to these foods and Overreact and have erratic behavior when they do get them. It is very possible That essentially what we're seeing in like families that are nervous about sugar is that those parents are expressing a high level of anxiety Around their kids having sugar. They're restricting it really heavily Their kids are only getting it when they're in sort of social settings with other kids Kind of all of these explanations are coming into play for some families dude. That's how I was with MTV What are you talking about we didn't have cable and so I would go over to friends houses And all I wanted to do was watch music videos No, that was our family too my parents would talk about like we can't have TV in the house If we have TV all we do is watch TV And there wasn't any recognition of like when you have it all the time the bloom is off the rose right and you have actual willpower Around it. I had no MTV willpower. I know I can't have this thing So I'm gonna be like a camel filling up my hump. Yeah with TV, right? Or maybe the Bjork videos were just really good And it was worth it. I mean the Bjork videos are good Gondry hive it is worth noting just to close out this section that today most mainstream professional associations and health organizations Do not recommend any dietary interventions for people with ADHD There just isn't enough evidence to suggest this is an effective treatment for most kids with ADHD Kids may have ADHD and food allergies or sensitivities But ADHD isn't treated or caused by dietary sources just like full stop, right? Right and yet it is the first place that we go as a society because we think of this as like personal responsibility shit There's always a lot of anxiety about children among like middle-aged and older people Just because like the mores and the music and the behavior of kids is just a total mystery to everyone who's a little bit older Yeah, and so things like autism and ADHD There's this little thing in the back of your little middle-aged brain that goes maybe this is fake Yeah, absolutely. It allows people who don't have ADHD to dismiss people who do have ADHD, right? Yeah, my kids don't have ADHD. Yeah, absolutely. It's probably just a cucumbers or something Michael Aubrey. Are you ready for our next big idea about sugar? I want the rats I'm here for the rats. The next big idea We're gonna dig into is the idea that we can predict how different foods impact most people's blood sugar Is this the glycemic index section? This is the glycemic index section. Thank you. I'm excited Have you heard of the glycemic index from anybody other than me? For the last like three years you've been talking about this constantly. I've been wanting to do the glycemic episode for so long My understanding is that it's like a real thing that like certain foods spike your blood sugar and then some of them spike it more So this is the whole thing of like eating brown rice rather than white rice and high fiber foods rather than low fiber foods Rather than spiking your insulin like a little Everest. They flatten the curve. Yes, they make it a little hill Yeah, it's like a it's like the hill from the windows desktop background I mean you kind of nailed it, right? The glycemic index is also where we get these like a very Internet-y kind of claims that potatoes are worse for you than a Snickers bar or An apple is worse for you than ice cream Those are all just people parroting out results from the glycemic index which really does rank ice cream as being a Lower glycemic choice than an apple. Oh, it really does rank carrots as having more sugar than table sugar Is that because the ice cream is has like fat mixed with sugar? And so it like slows down how much it hits your body skipping ahead Could you stop skipping a hit a lot of people seem to think that our show is like scripted what they think this whole thing is fake I really don't know where Aubrey's going with this which is why I keep ruining the episodes Yeah, totally. That's why we both keep doing it. I know so Just to get into like the next level of detail with the glycemic index It's basically a scale that is plotted from zero to a hundred, right? Okay, the guy Who created the glycemic index is a Welsh physician and sixth-generation doctor named David Jenkins He went to Oxford. He's invested into the order of Canada for his contributions as a nutrition scientist Here is the study design for coming up with the initial glycemic index. This is published for the first time in 1981 They have volunteers fast for 12 hours as you do with fasting blood work, right? He would then feed a group of volunteers One food on its own Okay, just potato or just strawberries or just milk, okay? And then two hours later He would measure their blood sugar to see how that food had impacted their blood sugar. Okay This is where we get to the first problem with this study Would you like to guess how big the groups of volunteers were for each of these foods? Oh, is it like two people and one's like his cousin or something five to ten people? And is there big variation between the people and how much it's spiking it? Totally there's individual variants The other part of the study design is the way that they are feeding people these foods isn't you're eating a potato or an apple They want to have the same quantity of carbohydrate So they're feeding people 50 grams of carbohydrate in a given food Wait, how much is 50 grams of carbs? Is that like more than we would typically eat in a day? Oh my god, Michael Here are some examples. Oh a small bottle of coke like 16 ounces of coke 50 grams of carbs Okay, a cup of white rice 50 grams of carbs 10 cups of popcorn, okay 50 grams of carbs 20 cups of cucumber 50 grams of carbs gives me ADHD so people are sitting there eating 20 cups of cucumber Yeah, that's a lot of cucumbers man People also don't usually fast for 12 hours and then only eat one food, right? This is like dry toast without jam It's popcorn without butter and then it's not eating anything else for two hours, right? So when you eat potatoes alone your blood sugar does one thing when you eat potatoes with a steak The fat and the protein in that steak slow down your digestion And they kind of flatten the curve right like see McIndy's right So potatoes will have less of an effect if you are eating them with something with a lot of fat a lot of fiber some protein Whatever same thing is true if you put some avocado on some toast, right? Right avocado has a ton of fat and fiber in it both of which slow down digestion and Change the impact the glycemic sort of impact of the bread, right? So basically you can't really say that like potatoes have 35.7 Glycemic and nice because it depends on what you're eating them with and what you've eaten before and how much you're eating Etc. Yes, and that is the first problem of five problems The second sort of issue here is that lots of things influence the glycemic index of a food, right? Okay, potatoes come in different shapes and sizes if you are frying potatoes in oil those potatoes are gonna have more fat They're going to be digested differently and have a different glycemic index than a baked potato or a boiled potato, right? The type of sugar that a given food contains can change its glycemic index Fructose for example has a score of 23, but maltose has a score of 105 The structure of the starch in the food can impact its glycemic index Its ripeness, of course because of sugar. Yeah, totally So an unripe banana has a glycemic index of 30 and an overwrite banana has a glycemic index of 48 How a food is processed can impact its glycemic index for example rolling oats Disrupts the structure of its starches and makes them easier to digest and therefore raise its glycemic index and How much we chew food can impact its glycemic index, right? My understanding is that's like the very first diet was the like chew your food diet Chew your food a hundred times. So maybe he was on to something and like Thing three with the glycemic index we now know that individuals responses to different foods vary widely from person to person a Food that doesn't really move the needle on my blood sugar might make yours go through the roof This is true of two diabetic friends that I had years ago One of whom could eat popcorn all day and was like it's totally fine I love popcorn and the other one could have one handful and her blood sugar would go but anas, right? Oh, yeah, but this is like not very well known to people who are not sort of managing their blood sugar for medical reasons, right? there is not a Diet or a dietary intervention for people with diabetes or insulin resistance that is considered to be evidence-based. Oh, there's nothing So how do they test it for people with diabetes? How do they figure out how much it's spiking? Do they just do it on an individual basis and then go from there? You get a blood sugar monitor you test your blood sugar and I think in many cases folks are instructed By their health care providers to try out different things and test your blood sugar and see what it does problem number four the glycemic index is Build in popular diets as a method of weight loss, but research consistently shows it does not deliver weight loss One meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials on low glycemic diets followed for up to 17 months that looked at 2300 fat people Found no difference in body weight and waist circumference Another review from Cochran analyzed six RCTs with 202 participants Who followed low GI diets for five weeks to six months? And they found that they lost an average of one kilogram more than people on other diets, right? It sounds like every diet study and then the last thing to know about the glycemic index is that it isn't actually recommended for individual use. Oh Medical associations and institutions don't actually recommend Generally that individuals use the glycemic index as a standalone tool to decide what to eat The NHS has this to say quote foods with a high GI are not necessarily unhealthy and not all foods with a low GI are Healthy for example watermelon and sometimes parsnips are high GI foods while chocolate cake has a lower GI value Also foods that contain or are cooked with fat and protein Slow down the absorption of carbohydrate Lowering their GI for example Crisps have a lower GI than potatoes cooked without fat in the UK. They use the word crisps to mean elevator tinfoil The last thing I'll say on this point is that the glycemic index also isn't recommended for individual use by the American Diabetes Association for people with diabetes. Mmm. They rate the current data as poor quality There is some evidence that the glycemic index may be helpful in prevention, but it is not recommended in treatment Right. So again the folks who ostensibly need it the most are not recommended to use this as their tool for deciding what to eat Right. So basically it's like any other Framework, I guess where it's like maybe useful in certain circumstances I mean, maybe people use it and like it and that's fine But as a sort of population level recommendation, it just isn't very meaningful. Yeah, and it's hard to figure out It's not very intuitive. You have to have these tables with all these pages and pages of results And then of course all this stuff breaks down too as soon as you go to like a fucking restaurant These conversations are mostly happening among people who are not diabetic don't have PCOS and don't necessarily have insulin resistance So they're mostly people as a result who have a very imprecise understanding of blood glucose and how it all Works, right? Like a me Like a you You haven't taken me the rats yet. My three is where we get to the rats. Let's do small mammals saving the best for rats That's actually pretty good You've topped yourself. So Michael our third and final Big idea that we're gonna tackle today about sugar is the idea that sugar is addictive and Particularly that sugar is as addictive as cocaine. I know where you're going with this shit I always hate this where oftentimes you hear this rhetoric that's like it affects the same part of your brain as Heroin or whatever that just seems like the pleasure part of the brain. Yes, absolutely I think particularly this claim that sugar is as addictive as cocaine has really gained traction in the last five or so years, right? I wanted to start us out by saying that this is kind of a tough one because feelings run high about this one, right? Okay, cocaine is so fun. I genuinely would not know I have not done cocaine dude I thought due to the dare program that I would constantly get offered cocaine and like I am not cool enough to have ever been offered cocaine in my Whole life and like I absolutely would have done cocaine if someone had offered it to me So listen, I had a co-worker at one point who described me as having a two-drink personality That's good, right? He was like it's like you've already had a couple of drinks That's kind of your vibe. Yeah, I might say there is already a whisper of cocaine In your default setting, right? Yeah, a little bit turning up the volume on that is really something Imagine my little voice and personality So I see you a little Clip of how this is getting sort of build in mainstream media outlets This is a clip from good morning America from about two years ago The fucking title is studies show added sugar can be just as addictive as street drugs Street drugs again, I'm livid that I've never been offered cocaine on the street All right, everybody time to check your sweet tooth. Are you addicted to sugar? Some studies in the field of nutritional science and medicine show that diets high and added sugar can be as addictive as some street drugs like Cocaine so cutting added sugar from your diet if you're consuming too much can have some powerful and significant and positive effects on your overall health there's actually been a very significant body of Medical research nutritional science research that shows Using a test called a functional MRIs that when people ingest foods that are high and added sugar that the same part of their brain That gets stimulated when they get exposed to cocaine Also gets triggered and stimulated with foods that are high and added sugars In general the more added sugar in a food the more that brain reward center will be triggered Making you want more and more of it Okay, so I should stop doing cocaine and I should stop eating sugar I'm gonna stop eating sugar that'll have the same benefits as cocaine We should say that the research that exists around sugar and the dangers of sugar are all about added sugars So we're not actually talking about the sugar that exists in a nectarine or The sugar that exists in oats or whatever, right? Like we're not talking about sort of naturally existing sugars. We're talking about in the preparation of a food someone adds Cain sugar honey Fructose whatever and sweetens a food. Yeah, that's what we're talking about with most of this research but We're not very good at making those distinctions individually and it has allowed quite a few diets and quite a few spurious claims About any form of sugar, right? This is a tough one because again like feelings run high here I know and love a number of people who consider themselves like deeply consider themselves to be addicted to sugar. I Also know and love people who are in recovery from addiction to drugs and alcohol who are Profoundly frustrated with this discourse around sugar addiction My goal here isn't to get in between anyone and their understanding of their own body But to take a look at what the research says about this thing that's popping up more and more as kind of a buzzword And a really snappy kind of claim, right? I think one of the problems is the term addicted has a bunch of like different kind of individual and social meanings and also has this element of Physiological addiction like you go through like actual withdrawals, but then there's also psychological addiction like I remember years ago I interviewed a psychologist about sex addiction and What he said is that like on some level you can get addicted to anything like you can get addicted to skiing to the point where it disrupts your work life and your social life and That's a real thing and you don't want to take that away from people if they say that they're addicted to something But it's also distinct from Physiological symptoms of addiction. Yeah, absolutely. I mean like there are lots of ways to talk about addiction and dependency and Sugar addiction as a concept in the research is debated. There was one 2016 review in the European Journal of Nutrition that reviewed the available data and Here is what they said. I'm sending you a brick It says we find little evidence to support sugar addiction in humans and findings from the animal literature Suggests that addiction like behaviors such as binging occur only in the context of intermittent access to sugar Not the neurochemical effect of sugar Okay, so we don't find it in humans and when we find it in animals It's like if you restrict their sugar intake for a while Then they kind of like binge on it when they finally get access to it, right? So that's a 2016 review Here's a 2018 review from the British Journal of Sports Medicine It says consuming sugar produces effects similar to that of cocaine altering mood Possibly through its ability to induce reward and pleasure leading to the seeking out of sugar. It's not a great sentence It's not a great sense. That's true When this study came out one of the authors went even further and told the Guardian quote in animals It is actually more addictive than even cocaine So sugar is pretty much probably the most consumed addictive substance around the world and it is wreaking havoc on our health Okay, that 2018 meta-analysis that says sugar is as addictive as cocaine Led to really significant backlash with nutrition researchers. Oh, yeah, but the sound bite sugar is as addictive as cocaine Made it much further than the backlash which is like more nuanced more reason you have to talk to more people Versus like somebody makes a graphic on Instagram and is like sugar says addictive as cocaine and it gets shared a hundred thousand times And then there you are right Here is what appears to have happened Okay, it appears that the authors of the 2018 study may have straight up misunderstood the animal studies Oh those studies Restricted rats to having sugar for two hours every day. Okay, but when you take away the restriction The quote-unquote addictive behaviors also went away. Oh, okay, the rats did the same thing They had the same quote-unquote addictive behaviors for saccharin for the artificial sweetener Oh, so this appears to be about sweetness not about sugar per se. Oh like the taste sensation in this study rats were offered sugar water saccharin water or cocaine water dude seriously. Yeah, I've never been offered that either These rats are offered these different things and then they're given levers right to get more of the thing Right and the evidence here is the sugar rats wanted the most of the sugar But also so did the saccharin rats and the cocaine rats didn't necessarily want a huge amount of cocaine water The cocaine rats were too busy explaining the podcast they're about to launch There's a piece in the Guardian about this called is sugar really as addictive as cocaine scientists row over effect on body and brain Row was invented to help headline writers fit their headlines in this piece. They talked to a Cambridge psychiatrist Who was like, yeah, I mean rats are gonna eat food and not cocaine I Fair point Yeah, man. Yeah, I should say that this one is debated in part because the data just isn't there yet Multiple reviews on this topic describe the data as nascent or in its infancy Right many of the studies that we're talking about are mouse and rat studies. They're animal studies There are some human studies, but not as many as there are rat studies It's also debated because dopamine and brain response alone may not actually Constitute the same kind of dependency as drugs or alcohol the core argument about sugar addiction is That sugar consumption leads to dopamine release lighting up the same part of our brain as drug use as You noted that is kind of just a pleasure center of the brain Yeah sugar has a little bit more of an impact, right? Like it it creates more of that response, but lots of foods create that response in your brain, right? It appears that drugs like cocaine like heroin like opiates sort of writ large Actually hijack the controls of that reward center and make it stop working or work less effectively over time We don't really have data that shows that with sugar. I get a dopamine response every time I get a poke on Facebook Who's poking? Are we getting in the time machine going back to 2007? I wanted to see what reaction that would get from you. Nothing. You gave me nothing. I gave you nothing I have nothing to say about this This episode has about one million sources But there are two books that were particularly helpful and both of them are forthcoming later this year Oh, how did you read them? How did you get these? Because of our show people sometimes email us and say hey Do you want to read this book before it comes out and I say yes, will you open those emails? Also one of them is a book that I read and ended up blurbing because I liked it so much what you read Jump Wow So those two books that are coming out later this year are Fat talk parenting in the age of diet culture by Virginia souls And the second is by someone I don't know it is called sugar rush science Politics and the demonization of fatness. It's by Karen Thrasby and it's out in August I'm livid that you didn't rely on any YouTube videos for this. This is a quote from Fat talk parenting in the age of diet culture by Virginia soulsmith Virginia out later this month by the way pre-order it team She says dopamine is also known as the feel-good hormone It surges in our brains whenever we experience pleasure and defenders of the sugar addiction model cite this as evidence because the sugar Dopamine response can look like the response seen in the brains of people using narcotics But we also get dopamine responses from purely benign activities like seeing a puppy hugging a loved one or feeding our babies People who feel addicted to sugar interact with it quite differently than people who struggle with alcohol or drug dependency So called food addicts don't endanger their children or lose their life savings to obtain their highs so even the chair of the UK organization action on sugar Acknowledges that sugar is fundamentally different than other substances that we consider addictive right in 2014 Graham McGregor who's the chair of action on sugar told the Times quote I agree that sugar is not like tobacco It's not as addictive, but it's a major source of hidden calories And if you get it down it will help with obesity It's an overstatement Sometimes to get your point across you need to make it stronger Yeah, this is the thing we've confronted a lot before where it's like a lot of this stuff that sort of seems like scientific messaging is Actually like policy messaging. Yeah, it's social. Yeah, it's designed to be rhetorical or to like Reach a goal part of what happens when you invoke an addiction model Is that you also invoke all the trappings of that model, right? And the main way certainly in the US that we engage with addiction is abstinence, right? And it is not Very feasible for people to fully abstain from all forms of sugar And it's also not great for your body to not have any kind of glucose entering your system Yeah in the absence of a clear sort of scientific consensus here our cultural attitudes about sugar and addiction both have sort of moved in Hard to like fill the gap, right? Sugar has long been discussed as a possible sort of dietary cause of people getting fat It's been long discussed as a dietary cause of people getting diabetes all kinds of stuff that we heavily stigmatize Addiction is also something that we heavily stigmatize, right? Right. So when someone proposed that sugar was addictive it reinforced two Very deeply held sets of biased beliefs that fat people can't control themselves and That addicts are sort of like wretched and to be pitied and don't have self-control and they sort of did it to themselves Right of the vibe right with addiction Yeah, and what it's rhetorically trying to do is bring some of the Suspicion and fear and alarmism that we bring to conversations about drugs to sugar now But again, we don't actually have research that bears that out We might at some point who knows but as it stands, we don't have research that very clearly Illustrates any kind of like again scientific consensus that sugar is an addictive substance. Yeah, I don't understand why people are doing this I think they're doing it for like marketing or like public relations purposes Because like it doesn't seem like it's supported by the biological evidence at all it seems like they're doing this Maybe as a way of like reducing stigma like oh, they can't help it They're addicted or something but like I I don't think this is gonna have that effect I think this is probably coming from a similar place as the redefinition of quote-unquote obesity as a disease right yeah, which is sort of the desire to garner more attention To an issue that some researchers feel like isn't getting the attention that it deserves It's messaging that's designed to kind of grab you by the lapels and shake you right it has the side benefit you know quote-unquote benefit right of Reinforcing how we already feel about food making more fear about food in a time when we're sort of moving in a slightly more Anti-diet direction or have been right? This is a way that you can reclaim your deep fear and discomfort around food that feels beyond reproach right? And it's a way that you can think and talk about fat people without explicitly saying fat people you can talk about sugar addicts and sugar Addiction and the scourge of sugar addiction. I think there is this idea that that might be less destructive Right that like an addiction frame is less stigmatizing. I would say have some conversations with some addicts I just don't think that these like very superficial Relabeling of the terminology around widely stigmatized groups like really does anything I think you can call like fatness a disease or not call it a disease But like fat people are very stigmatized in our society Yeah, so the only thing that's gonna happen is they're just gonna attach the stigma to the new term I am of a mind that if there are new terms coming about to describe a particular Minoritized community that that should be the decision of that community not the decision of doctors who are like I've decided This is what's best for you. Yeah, and any sort of rhetorical move that you use to amplify your message Has some consequences some of which you will foresee and some of which you will not I mean, yeah This is clearly a rhetorical move to get people to think differently about sugar But what it has done is created a really fundamental misperception of The sort of like Chemical functions of sugar in your body, right? Right this sort of use of an addiction parallel Really lends a sense of urgency, right? That this is like a matter of life and death that we can't fuck around right and that's actually what's happening with sugar, right? Right there is no such thing as one day you have too much sugar and then you die if you're not like diabetic or something else, right? Yeah, there's no opioid overdose Analogy to sugar right what we're talking about is for say the onset of diabetes Years and years and years of creeping up blood sugar that can be caused by lots of things and as we learned earlier Different things for different people and different sugars for different people, right caused by cucumbers That's what I learned in the last hour. That's what you that's where we left it, right? Oh, that's why I'm fat. I keep drinking tea You