g AFTERNOON g CONTENTS

Why Is Sugar So Irresistible?

It’s not your fault that you can’t say no to sweet treats—you are fighting millions of years of evolution, which has conditioned you to crave sugar’s instant rewards.

Sugar—no one needs it, but everyone loves it. Your body regards sugar as a true wonder food—you have taste buds devoted to sensing it and reward centers in the brain that generate intense pleasure when you eat it. Why? Because it does away with the hard graft of digestion. An apple delivers the same energy as a large spoonful of sugar but is disintegrated by the digestive system slowly, yielding a steady trickle of glucose over a few hours. Pure sugar, however, inundates the bloodstream within minutes. For 99 percent of our history, refined sugar didn’t exist—unless our ancestors stumbled on a beehive, sugars were not part of their diet. In modern times, consumption has skyrocketed—and our bodies aren’t cut out for a sustained sugar onslaught. With many of us living sedentary lives, sugar makes it easy to eat more food than we need, resulting in a bulging waistline. But more than making us fat, too much sugar has been implicated in many serious health conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and some cancers.

So given that we’re programmed to love sugars, are some healthier than others? Moderate intake of naturally occurring sugars, such as lactose in milk or fructose in fresh fruit, is fine. It’s lots of added, refined sugars, such as sucrose (table sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), that really cause problems. Directly converted into fat within the liver, HFCS leads to fatty liver, furred arteries, and a high risk of diabetes, when the body can no longer keep high blood sugar in check.

If you really can’t ignore those candy cravings, try indulging right after dinner. Sugars have an instant, if short-lived, appetite-curbing effect, so a little of something sweet can block the urge to continue eating, allowing time for the gut and brain to register that you are full.

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sugar rush

Some foods release sugar more quickly into the bloodstream than others—these are the most irresistible to the energy-hungry brain.

It was back in 1972, when British researcher John Yudkin published his book Pure, White and Deadly, that the warning was first sounded to the world about the health risks of eating too much sugar.

Cast out as a crackpot by the scientific world at large, Yudkin turned out to be on the money, yet his voice was comprehensively smothered by the power of the sugar industry.

Enticed by the big dollars of big sugar, health researchers were persuaded to redirect their efforts away from sugar toward uncovering the “evils” of a high-fat diet. Chief flag-waver for the fat-is-bad brigade was the (now much-critiqued) American researcher Ancel Keys, who poured scorn on dissenting scientists’ findings.

Convinced by the weight of the evidence that (correctly) showed how diets high in saturated fats caused arteries to fur up and led to heart disease, government bodies worldwide shifted their guidelines. Before long, fats in general were branded as public health enemy number one. Sugar was sidelined as a lesser evil, while the nails were hammered instead into the coffin of the deep-fat fryer.

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