The Seba library treats Sugar in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including Maté, Gabor, Jeynes, Kendall D., McGilchrist, Iain).
Junk foods and sugar are also chemically addictive because of their effect on the brain’s intrinsic ‘narcotics,’ the endorphins. Sugar, for example, provides a quick fix of endorphins and also temporarily raises levels of the mood
Maté argues that sugar’s action on endogenous opioid systems renders it functionally equivalent to narcotic drugs, grounding symbolic hunger in demonstrable neurochemistry.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008thesis
Intermittent and excessive sugar feeding has been shown to change neurochemical pathways in the same way that addictive drugs do
Jeynes synthesizes animal and human research demonstrating that sugar’s intermittent consumption reconfigures dopaminergic and opioid reward circuitry in patterns indistinguishable from those produced by substances of abuse.
, The importance of nutrition in aiding recovery from substance use disorders: A review, 2012thesis
Despite clear evidence that we are focussing on the wrong white crystals – salt, rather than sugar – there is still, according to many experts, ‘a very strong need’ to raise awareness of the adverse consequences of low salt intake
McGilchrist deploys sugar as evidence of institutional scientific failure and deliberate industry misdirection, positioning sugar’s pathological centrality as suppressed knowledge within public health discourse.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
it has been suggested that the sugar industry put a lot of money into turning the spotlight on salt and fat, partly in order to deflect attention from the damaging effects of sugar
This passage extends the cultural-critical reading of sugar, implicating economic power structures in the systematic concealment of sugar’s harm — a thesis about ideology as much as nutrition.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Since most compulsive eating is uncontrollable wolfing of concentrated carbohydrates, and since a high protein and/or high fat diet is often successful when the 1000-calorie-a-day diet has failed
Woodman locates compulsive carbohydrate consumption at the psychosomatic centre of obesity, suggesting that the body’s metabolic desperation for carbohydrates mirrors an unconscious psychological dynamic that caloric restriction cannot address.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980supporting
The tide that keeps flooding the ship, Dr. Lustig says, stems from a culture in which many major
Maté invokes an endocrinologist’s despair over escalating metabolic disease in children as evidence that cultural forces — including dietary ones — systematically overwhelm individual therapeutic efforts.
, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, 2022supporting
people with diabetes need to maintain reasonably tight control over their glucose levels, and there are a finite number of effective strategies for managing blood sugar
Miller situates blood sugar management within motivational interviewing’s change-facilitation framework, treating glucose control as the concrete behavioral target through which deeper health motivation is engaged.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
It receives the message ‘hunger’ from the lowered level of glucose in the blood; this is coordinated with the increased contractions of the empty stomach, perceived by the higher centres of the brain and interpreted as hunger.
Woodman grounds her psychological analysis of obesity in the hypothalamic glucose-hunger feedback loop, establishing the biological substrate for what she will subsequently read as symbolic feminine hunger.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980supporting
Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Intermittent, Excessive Sugar Intake
Barrett’s bibliography cites the foundational Avena et al. study on sugar addiction, signalling that the neurochemical evidence for sugar’s addictive properties is part of the evidentiary architecture underlying her broader theory of constructed emotion and body-budget regulation.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017aside