Can sugar addiction be linked to Opioid addiction. Turns out it definitely can be!.
The university of behavioral sciences of Guelph found that eating sugar can trigger the exact same “reward” pathways in the brain that opiates do. I guess this is not really surprising as we have 2 major epidemics occurring in our country: opioid abuse and obesity. Is it perhaps the carbohydrate craze in our country that is the real culprit? Are we feeding our nucleus accumbans (the reward center in the brain) overdoses of sugar to help deal with our problems? Many of us use snickers bars much like heroin addicts use opioids.
We are having a bad day and amazingly, the snickers does seem to help curb that sense of stress. It produces a calm in the brain. That calm doesnt last of course. How many of us can just eat 1 small york peppermint patty?? or one oreo? In new studies it now seems that refined sugars will drive addictive behaviors by triggering the same brain pathways.
The studies found another very intersting finding: when they fed mice hi doses of hi fructose corn syrup and then the mouses usual dose of oxycodone, the mice didnt find the reward as good and started taking even more oxycodone to get that hi back! Wow, who would have thought that the crazy push for hi fructose corn syrup in our country may actually fuel the fire for the opioid crisis!
