24 May 2012 Why cupcakes are the new cocaine
Sugar is one of the substances and objects that are carving new patterns of addictive behaviour in a disorientated world. This behaviour is the subject of new book, The Fix: How Addiction is Invading Our Lives and Taking Over Your World. This article is written by its author, Damien Thompson.
Along with prescription drugs, internet porn, computer games and dozens of other consumer items, we are forming an intimate relationship with sugary snacks that supplements and complements the “traditional” addictions to alcohol, gambling and illegal drugs.
These new objects of desire may not be drugs – though they have a drug-like capacity to stimulate the brain – but they mimic the addictive process of replacing the people in your life with things that yield guaranteed but short-term rewards.
Year after year, the West’s love affair with sugar intensifies. But we pay very little attention to our compulsive attitude to the stuff. This is partly because we don’t like to think about it – and partly because we’ve been misled into thinking that our consumption of saturated fat lies at the heart of obesity and eating disorders.
Increasing numbers of doctors think sugar does more harm to our arteries and our waistlines than fat. So does the restaurateur Henry Dimbleby, who runs the award-winning Leon chain of restaurants.
“Sugar is our number one eating problem – I think 40 per cent of the population has some sort of addiction to it,” he says.
“Watch what happens in an office when somebody walks in carrying a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. There’s a general squealing sound and everyone rushes over excitedly. You’d think someone had just arrived at a party with a few grams of coke. People descend on it in the same way.”
Is that because sugar is addictive? In February 2011, a team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, published a report in the journal Nature entitled “Public health: The toxic truth about sugar”. This dismissed the popular notion of sugar as “empty” calories. On the contrary, they were bad calories: “A little is not a problem, but a lot kills – slowly.”
We’ve known for years that refined sugar is also implicated in damaging the liver and kidneys and is the main cause of the worldwide spread of Type 2 diabetes.
“If these results were obtained in experiments with any illegal drug, they would certainly be used to justify the most severe form of retribution against those unfortunate enough to be caught in possession of such a dangerous substance,” writes Michael Gossop of the National Addiction Centre at King’s College, London.
But is sugar actually a drug? Gossop thinks so. As he puts it, if a casual visitor from another galaxy were to drop in on planet earth, he would assume that human beings were even heavier drug users than we already are.
Why? Because vast numbers of us ingest a white crystalline substance several times a day…..
The Telegraph: Read the full article