Cocaine is what it is and it doesn’t usually pretend or hide itself.
Sugar is hidden in somewhat harmless places, such as ketchup (that young kids seem to like to put on everything… which of course already had sugar in it!) and then form lifelong addictions 🙁
Of all the foods consumed today, refined sugar is considered to be one of the most harmful….
In 1997 Americans devoured 7.3 billion pounds of candy.
Americans spent an estimated $23.1 billion dollars on candy and gum and its only gotten worse leading up to today
Consumption of processed foods (which are laced with sugar) cost the American public more than $54 billion in dental bills each year, so the dental industry reaps huge profits from the programmed addiction of the public to sugar products. …Today we have a nation that is addicted to sugar. In 1915, the national average of sugar consumption (per year) was around 15 to 20 pounds per person.
Today the average person consumes his/her weight in sugar, plus over 20 pounds of corn syrup. To add more horrors to these facts there are some people that use no sweets and some who use much less than the average figure, which means that there is a percentage of the population that consume a great deal more refined sugar than their body weight.
The human body cannot tolerate this large amount of refined carbohydrates. The vital organs in the body are actually damaged by this gross intake of sugar. Research indicates that Oreos are just as addictive as drugs. The specific drugs included in the study were cocaine and morphine, which is what heroin becomes immediately after injection.
“Our research supports the theory that high-fat/high-sugar foods stimulate the brain in the same way that drugs do,” [neuroscientist Joseph] Schroeder said. “It may explain why some people can’t resist these foods despite the fact that they know they are bad for them.”…
“My research interests stemmed from a curiosity for studying human behaviour and our motivations when it comes to food,” said [neuroscience major] Jamie Honohan. “We chose Oreos not only because they are America’s favourite cookie, and highly palatable to rats, but also because products containing high amounts of fat and sugar are heavily marketed in communities with lower socioeconomic statuses.”…
“Even though we associate significant health hazards in taking drugs like cocaine and morphine, high-fat/ high-sugar foods may present even more of a danger because of their accessibility and affordability,” she said.
People who eat things “they know…are bad for them”Can not help themselves. The explanation for this unproven premise is that “high-fat/high-sugar foods stimulate the brain in the same way that drugs do.” But if the neurological effects of Oreos make them impossible to resist, how is it that most people manage to resist them, consuming them in moderation or not at all? So what exactly did the rats do in this test? They favoured the side of a maze where they were given Oreos to the same extent that they favoured that side of the maze when they were given an injection of cocaine or morphine. An astonishing 94 percent of rats who were allowed to choose mutually-exclusively between sugar water and cocaine, chose sugar.
Even rats who were addicted to cocaine quickly switched their preference to sugar, once it was offered as a choice. The rats were also more willing to work for sugar than for cocaine. The researchers speculate that the sweet receptors (two protein receptors located on the tongue), which evolved in ancestral times when the diet was very low in sugar, and have not adapted to modern times’ high-sugar consumption. Therefore, the abnormally high stimulation of these receptors by our sugar-rich diets generates excessive reward signals in the brain, which have the potential to override normal self-control mechanisms, and thus lead to addiction. Furthermore, when the researchers “used Immunohistochemistry to measure the expression of a protein called c-Fos, a marker of neuronal activation, in the nucleus accumbens, or the brain’s ‘pleasure centre,’” they found that “the Oreos activated significantly more neurones than cocaine or morphine.” So in fact, Oreos are more addictive than cocaine or heroin. Or to put it another way Cocaine and heroin are less addictive than Oreos. Which makes you wonder why people go to prison for selling the drugs but not for selling the cookies, especially since Oreos and similar foods “may present even more of a danger.”
In another study laboratory animals’ tendency to consume drugs to excess when they are bored and lonely has pretty clear parallels in human behaviour. But unlike rats and monkeys, humans are capable of reason and foresight, as well as emotions such as guilt and regret. They also have considerable control over their own environments. If the reinforcing power of drugs is not the only factor in addiction among rats and monkeys, it surely is not a complete explanation for why some people get hooked on these substances while most do not.
The idea that people can take or leave cocaine or heroin in the same way they can take or leave Oreos seems inconsistent with research that supposedly shows how powerfully reinforcing these substances are. Anything that provides pleasure or relieves stress can be the focus of an addiction, the strength of which depends not on the inherent power of the stimulus but on the individual’s relationship with it, which in turn depends on various factors, including his personality, circumstances, values, tastes, and preferences.
The reality of addiction lies not in patterns of brain activity but in the lived experience of the addict. Locating addiction in the unmediated effect that certain stimuli have on “the brain’s pleasure centre” cuts the addict out of the picture. His desires and choices do not matter, because he is under the control of irresistible impulses caused by exposure to stimuli too powerful for him to deal with on his own. And this is where the fallacious moral justification for forcible intervention, whether aimed at drug abuse or obesity, comes from: He cannot help himself, so we must help him, whether he likes it or not.
According to a 2012 article in the journal Nature, it’s a toxic substance that should be regulated like tobacco and alcohol. Studies show that too much sugar (both in the form of natural sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup) not only helps make us fat, it also wreaks havoc on our liver, mucks up our metabolism, impairs brain function, and may leave us susceptible to heart disease, diabetes, and maybe even cancer. So far, no federal action has been taken, and experts say raising awareness isn’t enough, especially when so many of our food options contain sugar.
To examine the hold sugar can have over us, substance-abuse researchers have performed brain scans on subjects eating something sweet. What they’ve seen resembles the mind of a drug addict: When subjects taste sugar, the brain lights up in the same regions as it would in an alcoholic drinking a bottle of gin.
Dopamine—the so-called reward chemical—spikes and reinforces the desire to have more. (Sugar also fuels the calming hormone serotonin.) Research suggests that too much sugar forms free radicals in the brain and compromises nerve cells’ ability to communicate. This could have repercussions on how well we remember instructions, process ideas, and handle our moods. Sugar contributes to premature aging, just as cigarettes and UV rays do.
When skin support structures collagen and elastin break down from sun or other free-radical exposure, cells try to repair themselves. But this process slows down with age. And when sugar is present in the skin, it forms cross-links with amino acids that may have been damaged by free radicals. These cross-links jam the repair mechanism and, over time, leave you with prematurely old-looking skin. Cocaine is a powerfully addictive drug. Thus, it is unlikely that an individual will be able to reliably predict or control the extent to which he or she will continue to want or use the drug. And, if addiction takes hold, the risk for relapse is high even following long periods of abstinence. Recent studies have shown that during periods of abstinence, the memory of the cocaine experience or exposure to cues associated with drug use can trigger tremendous craving and relapse to drug use.
Users take cocaine in “binges,” during which the cocaine is used repeatedly and at increasingly higher doses. This can lead to increased irritability, restlessness, panic attacks, and paranoia—even a full-blown psychosis, in which the individual loses touch with reality and experiences auditory hallucinations. With increasing dosages or frequency of use, the risk of adverse psychological or physiological effects increases.
Yet after all this, sugar is still more of a threat as we will continue to blindly be deceived by these Corporate sugar giants that sneak sugar into almost anything possible for us to eat so that they can profit.
The $1 trillion industrial food system is the biggest drug dealer around, responsible for contributing to tens of millions of deaths every year and siphoning trillions of dollars from our global economy through the loss of human and natural capital.
Sugar, doesn’t sound so sweet anymore, does it?
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