Come On, Just Read This Thing About Sugar

People understand that killing the messenger is wrong; that's why the phrase exists. It's an enduring idiom, with versions of the notion present in the records of ancient China, ancient Rome, and Shakespeare. It endures for the dismalest of reasons, namely, that people want to kill the messenger and must be cautioned against it.

All I'm saying is that I want you to give up candy and sweets because I care about you, and I don't want you to murder me for saying so. (I don't really think you'll murder me, but if pageviews are any indicator, you don't want to hear bad news or even think about sugar.) I understand that life can be hard, or boring, and that jamming straight crystallized happiness into your brain can be the only redeeming aspect of some overcast days. That's essentially why so many of our troops became addicted to heroin in Vietnam.

Heroin and sugar both target the nucleus accumbens, which is the reward center of the brain. (So do exercise and correctly answering Jeopardy "answers," so this could be misleading without context.) The problem is that drugs and sugar both bypass the whole "doing-stuff-in-life-to-get-chemical-rewards-in-your-brain" thing, and just give you the rewards, no questions asked. It's like having a key to the back door of the Staples Reward Center, instead of earning enough points on every eligible purchase to get that "free" Lion King mousepad like an upright citizen.

You probably don't do heroin for a number of reasons. I can make this assumption, in part, because people doing heroin tend to have minimal interest in reading nutrition blogs. It's statistically likely that you don't smoke cigarettes, either, for similar reasons. Those habits are costly, dangerous, and frowned upon by a majority of the population. This creates a culturally-constructed bulwark against getting involved with junk and cigs alike.

In other words, you don't have to think very hard or exercise much self control to never begin injecting smack or suffering through your first pack of Kool Milds. Your culture is helping you avoid those choices at every step of the way.

Enter sugar.

You wake up, and you want to eat. Something sweet? Sure. Or something savory, like bread, injected with high fructose corn syrup. Wait, what? Maybe just some fruit juice and a "natural" granola bar with some sugar not added, exactly, but rather present in the things the manufacturer included because they naturally contain sugar. Regardless, after you eat breakfast, you've probably had your daily allotment of sugar. But you're just getting started.

At this point, many people know that sugar is in nearly everything we consume. The reason is simple: it is delicious and addictive, and those are properties you want products to have if you make consumable products for a living. So what's the big deal?

When you consume fructose (in honey, fruit, berries, root vegetables, or nearly any processed food) your body uses the liver to metabolize it. Your liver will try and keep up with the demand of the 130 pounds of sugar (on average) you'll consumer this year, but it will ultimately fail. Then what?

The extra sugar is converted into fat within the liver. This is bad. Diabetes bad. The extra fat also spills into your bloodstream, which is also bad.

All this is metabolically inevitable when you consumer a high-sugar diet, which you'll want to do because... sugar also impacts that nucleus accumbens, remember? So the opioid receptors that make drug addicts such unpredictable roommates are working overtime in your own brain to keep you coming back to the sugar which is ruining your liver and blood.

None of this is "natural," because technology and industrial food production and marketing trends evolve much more quickly than human biology. Historically, it would be hard to get diabetes: you would only have an ounce of sugar when your tribe finds some berries, for instance.

So how can you keep your blood clean and not live some kind of fructose-induced Trainspotting nightmare? There is a solution that's not entirely depressing.

Eat more savory and sugarless and low-sugar snacks! Yes, the solution can still involve eating! Isn't this great? Don't reward the messenger; that would be equally unfair.

A recent study by Robert H. Lustig et al. showed that replacing sugary calories with other (delicious) calories, like those you'd find in a bagel, can reduce the destructive effects of sugar in children.

It's easy to say that moderation is key, and one can simply exercise discipline in regard to the cultural onslaught of sugar. The problem is that "moderation" relative to modern sugar levels is not true moderation. Our diet is so sugar-slanted that we are always grading on a curve, even when we think we are being "moderate" in our sugar intake.

The bottom line: don't forget that the first word in "junk food" is "junk." To put it another way, sugar gets diplomatic immunity in your brain, and sometimes you need to treat it like that guy who claims diplomatic immunity at the end of Lethal Weapon 2.  Got it? Maybe a rewatching is in your future. Cue that bad boy up, grab a bagel and a water, and relax.

Be well!