This is Your Body…This is Sugar…This is Your Body on Sugar

Yes, I went there. Where, you ask? To the famous anti-drug Public Service Announcement ad campaign from 1987 in which John Roselius compares your brain to an egg, drugs to a hot frying pan, and the frying egg to your brain on drugs. The ad returned for its ten-year anniversary in 1997 with actress Rachael Leigh Cook taking it a step further and destroying her kitchen with the frying pan to show what heroine does to your life and those around you. “The Frying Pan” PSA has also shown up in popular culture to include TV shows (Roseanne, Beverly Hills 90201, Married—with Children, Breaking Bad) and movies (Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, Batman Forever).

And while a drug addiction may have a more immediate affect on you, your friends and family than a sugar addiction, the ultimate consequence, death, can be the same. Sugar just takes a few years longer, and it can also become an addiction, just not nearly as powerful as heroine.

So this is your body on sugar…short and long term.

Your body absorbs sugar rather quickly, especially in liquid form, such as soda. As your body absorbs the sugar, your blood glucose begins to rise (again, more quickly if you consume it in liquid form). In order to regulate your blood glucose level, your pancreas then releases a hormone called insulin into your blood stream.  This is how your system usually works.  However, like any system, it can be overloaded, in this instance, by large amounts of sugar day after day.  As you ingest more sugar, your pancreas releases more insulin and eventually, the insulin can not cope with the amount of glucose in you blood.  This is a condition known as insulin resistance.  In other words, insulin is no longer able to regulate your blood glucose level and from insulin resistance, it is just a hop, step and jump to type 2 diabetes.

Some of the sugar you ingest is converted to glycogen and used for energy.  However, what if you ingest a lot of added sugar while spending your day composing blog posts for various websites?  In other words, you eat a lot of junk food while doing little physical activity.  Well, your body then stores that excess glycogen as fat in case you need it at a later date.  Unfortunately, many of us never need it at a later date and our body simply keeps storing it as fat.  This is called weight gain and it can cause a myriad of health issues from arteriosclerosis to heart disease to hypertension to type 2 diabetes.

It is not only your pancreas and heart that suffer from excess added sugar in your diet, your liver does as well.  As Juliet once opined, “That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.”  This can also apply to sugar as it too has many other names, such as sucrose, dextrose, glucose and the ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup.  Well, guess which organ metabolizes all that fructose found in processed foods?  Yep, your liver and it is fine with that so long as it is not overwhelmed.  If, on the other hand, the fructose keeps coming, day after day, it is likely you will develop nonalcoholic fatty liver disease which is when too much fat is stored in your liver cells.  This can lead to inflammation of the liver, liver scarring (cirrhosis similar to that caused by alcoholism) and ultimately liver failure.  Not surprisingly, the causes of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease are obesity, insulin resistance, hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) and high levels of triglycerides (fats) in the blood, all of which can occur from too much added sugar in your diet.

Many health experts, but not all, state that sugar is addictive, hence the drug reference at the start if this post.  It seems that each time we binge on sugar, dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, is released.  Dopamine is part of our brain’s “reward circuit” associated with addictive behavior.  In other words, it helps to give us a “sugar high.”  We then crave that “high” and seek to recreate it on a regular basis.  However, it takes more and more dopamine to achieve that high over time which requires more and more sugar.  You see where this is going, right?  Severe cravings, increased tolerance for sugary foods and, when you attempt to stop…withdrawal.

To sum up:  there is no good that comes from your body on sugar…none.  The only real difference, in my mind, between a sugar addiction and a drug addiction is the severity and the length of time it takes to detrimentally affect your life.  If you’re hooked on sugar, admit it and then take the steps to get off it.  Your body (friends and family, too) will thank you.