Episode 005: I recently saw a meme created by Dr Mark Hyman that said “sugar is 8 times more addictive than cocaine”.
It made me remember a scene from the documentary Food Matters. One of the interviewees was talking about how addictive sugar is. She made a comment along the lines of “giving kids sugar is like rolling up their sleeve and injecting them with heroin”.
This way of talking about food, particularly sugar and processed food, is becoming more common place. But is it true? Is sugar so addictive that when you have it you become powerless to its pull? Does eating fast food get you hooked like a heroin addict?
This week’s podcast is all about cravings and food addiction. It’s a topic I’m very passionate about because I think there are a lot of misconceptions around the idea. And not just with food addiction, but with drug addiction as well.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 5 of Real Health Radio.
Welcome to Real Health Radio: Health advice that’s more than just about how you look. Here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hello and welcome to Episode 5 of Real Health Radio. Today I want to talk about cravings and food addiction. I saw a meme by Dr. Mark Hyman a couple weeks ago that said sugar was eight times more addictive than cocaine. I watched his documentary called Fed Up, which really vilified sugar and really blamed the obesity epidemic pretty squarely on its shoulders. Part of this was, he said, because sugar is just so addictive.
I also remember another section from a different documentary called Food Matters, and there was an interviewee – I can’t remember who it was; it was a female – but she likened giving sugar to kids to basically rolling up their sleeves and injecting them with heroin.
I think this kind of sensationalized way of talking about food is just becoming much more of the norm. I’ve been seeing it more and more, and personally I really disagree with it. When I was starting to put together this podcast, this was one of the topics that I really wanted to cover first and foremost, because it’s just so important.
Today what I want to do is first off look at cravings and how they work within the body and use this as then the foundation to transition into looking at food addiction and is it really a thing, how does it go on, etc.
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Let’s start with cravings. Cravings have, from my perspective, two components to them, if I’m making generalizations. There’s a physiological component and/or then an emotional component.
When people come and see me, so often they’ll say “I’m a slave to sugar” or “I’m a slave to chocolate,” that they have these really strong cravings. This can be all the time, it can be at certain times of the month. From a physiological perspective, if someone’s getting cravings for this reason, it’s because there’s not enough energy coming in. This can be because the meal that they ate was too small. It could be because they’d gone too long between meals. It could be that they’re genuinely not eating enough calories over a day. But it’s coming from an energy perspective.
This can still be happening when someone is overweight or obese. I think too often, people think, “look at them, they’ve got so much fat on their body, it should just be turned into energy seamlessly.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like this. The body really wants to protect this stuff, so it’s not just effortlessly turning that stuff into energy. It will still be using and giving someone lots of cravings despite their size.
When someone is then getting cravings, what are they typically craving? If we think outside of the weird and wonderful things that people crave when they’re pregnant and just look at the everyday cravings, what people are normally craving are things that are calorie-dense, highly palatable food, foods that are converted into energy very easily, things that people barely have to chew. I’m thinking of a McDonald’s burger or a hamburger or chips, where basically you can get that stuff in and down very, very quickly without much chewing and much effort. Things like that, or chocolate or sweets or ice cream.
If we’re looking at it from a physiological perspective and that’s what’s driving it, your body is trying to prevent you from starving. Again, this can sound crazy if someone is overweight or obese, but at that cellular level, their body isn’t having enough energy, so they’re in a sense starving. What their body is doing as part of those cravings is trying to get that person to eat more to bring energy to their cells to keep them being able to function.
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I think a perfect example for this can be around a woman’s cycle. Most women will often experience the fact that they will get cravings a couple of days up to a week leading up to their cycle, maybe the first couple of days of their cycle as well. If I’m looking at the body, during this time is a huge demand on the body. There’s lots more resources needed. It’s the time of the month that I typically tell women that they should be eating the most of really any point within that month.
If they’re getting those strong cravings at that time, typically it’s from a physiological perspective of they just need to have more energy coming in. And that’s not the only side of it, but it’s definitely one of the first things that I think of.
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Then the other side of cravings is looking at it from an emotional perspective. People are then using food in this scenario to self-soothe. People are using their cravings or are getting cravings because they’re wanting a distraction. They’re bored, they’re upset, they had an argument with their partner, they had some bad news at work, etc., so they’re using food to deal with their emotions.
This is very much a learned behavior. I look at the way that parents will often reward their children with chocolates, and it’s not just about “here’s the chocolate”; it’s giving the child the chocolate, telling them how good they were, how amazing they were, at the same time saying “how amazing did that taste?”, messing all of these things up into one little package. It means that then when someone starts to eat chocolate, it’s no longer just about the taste of it. It’s about the flashback to those emotions, those situations – even if that’s very much at a subconscious level.
In this scenario, then, those cravings aren’t just about lack of energy or might be totally not about lack of energy, but because of emotions.
What I often find in practice is people have a tough time deciphering between these two. I would definitely say there’s often a feeling of “It can’t be because I’m hungry, it can’t be because of energy. I’ve eaten a lot. I eat a lot more than my coworkers” or “I have a much bigger lunch than others.” So because there’s then the connection between what I eat and my weight, and people are so worried about their weight, the natural default for most people is they want to believe that all their cravings are from an emotional perspective because they don’t want to think “maybe I need to be eating more.” So they try to blame all of this stuff on their emotions.
The way that I typically deal with it is I take the opposite assumption. This is normally pretty easy for me to do because I’m looking at someone’s food logs and I can then make some decisions based on that. But I work on the assumption to start with that someone’s cravings are coming from a physiological perspective.
Let’s start with getting you to be eating more, to be eating more consistently and working out how often you need to be eating, to be looking at what are the foods that actually support you and keep your energy going for a longer time, to getting people stopping with arbitrary food rules about “good” and “bad” foods in absolute terms and starting to understand what works for them.
What I find is when I do this with people, most of the time this takes care of their cravings. They’re then coming back to mean and they’re like, “I’m just not craving sugar the same way as I was. I’m not eating anywhere near as much chocolate as I was,” etc. There becomes this distinction where they are like, “I still enjoy eating that food, but it’s different.” There’s a difference between “I kind of fancy that and I’m going to have it” and “oh my God, I must have that and I feel a slave to it.” What I find is when people are starting to support their body from a physiological perspective, their cravings are more about “ooh, I fancy that” as opposed to “I need / I must.”
I start as part of that assumption from a physiological perspective. If they’re then doing those things, they’re eating more, they’re eating consistently, they’re starting to support their body, but they’re still getting the cravings, then we can start to look at the emotional side of things, their patterns of behavior, their thought patterns.
We can start to look at, what is happening before you get the craving? When are they coming up? What is the environment? Is it at work, is it at home? What times of the day is it normally happening? What foods is it for? What are things you can identify that trigger you or set you off? Have you always craved these foods, or what are the earliest memories you have of having these foods? So we start to then pick apart where this emotional side is coming from.
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There’s two ideas I wanted to share with you that I use when looking at this, and I would say I use this not just for cravings, but to do with all people’s issues around food.
The first is an idea that came from Scott Abel. He talks about five different mood states that can impact on someone choosing to use food as an external device to deal with internal and emotional issues.
The first is false highs and feeling of entitlement to indulge, as in “I deserve this.”
The second is unnecessary lows that people bring upon themselves, so “I’m all alone, no one cares about me,” so the only means to then relieve that anxiety around food is to have a food indulgence or to have a food deprivation. If we’re thinking about it from a cravings perspective or a food addiction perspective, it would be to then be having a food indulgence as part of that.
The next mood state is to do with numbness in the sense of “there’s just so much stress going on for me right now from so many sources that I’m just overwhelmed and I feel alienated from connection within myself, so the way that I want to deal with this is to have a food indulgence or having food be my mental preoccupation.” So it serves as a mute button so they don’t have to be dealing with all of this other stuff. It can just numb that stuff out.
The fourth one is emotional avoidance. Someone’s got deep or intense emotions that are just really too intense for them to face up with, or they just feel so hurt or whatever it may be, they can then use that food indulgence as an external source to self-soothe the soul. It’s then used in this way in the beginning to take away emotional torment, but in the long run, it leads to more of this.
The fifth reason he states is emotional confusion, when people have lost the ability to properly label what an emotion is. Because they can’t label what’s going on, they just can’t feel it properly in order to be able to deal with it and let go. In this case, they’re then using food to simplify that confusion, so you then don’t know what’s going on, but if I have this food indulgence, I can then beat myself up about the food indulgence. I can still have that emotion, but at least I’ve been able to label it and give it a reason as opposed to before, where I’m just confused and I have no idea what’s going on.
Those different states can be wide. People can get into cravings or be using food to deal with emotions, to be using food addiction or why food can become “addictive.”
The other way I look at things is through a concept that was brought to me by Tony Robbins. He talks about the six human needs that we all have. One of the things that he always says is that people keep their problems for a reason. I’m a big believer in this, and from working with lots of clients, I’ve come to realize that this is the case. People don’t do things for reasons – when people say to me, “I don’t understand why I’m doing this. This benefits me in no way whatsoever,” when we start to dig deeper, it’s like, no, it does actually benefit you in lots of different ways, and we go through it.
With these six human needs that Tony Robbins talks about, he says that we have these needs. We all will try to meet them in one way or another, and that can be positive, negative, or neutral, but we’ll find ways to meet them. It’s the first four needs that we will always find ways to meet, and then the other two will just depend on the situation.
The six human needs, one is certainty, one is variety, one is significance, the next is love and connection, then growth, and then contribution. When people are getting their cravings and when they’re getting problems around food, it normally links into when everything is feeling uncertain, I’m able to turn to food, so it then meets my need for certainty.”
Or in terms of variety – variety is just a change of state, so when I’m feeling really horrible, I know I can turn to food and it’s able to change my state, even if it is just momentarily.
In terms of significance, it can be from lots of different angles. Significance can be “I’ve got this huge problem. If anyone else had this massive problem that I have to deal with on a daily basis, they wouldn’t be able to get through it, but I’m able to cope,” so their problems around food become their way of significance.
I’m just giving you examples here. These aren’t the only way that this can be interpreted, but it’s just a nice way I find of looking at why people are doing the behaviors they’re doing when they often tell me that there is no reason, it’s not serving them at all, and then we look at it in this way and they’re like “oh, actually it does help me.”
In terms of love and connection, a lot of times when I speak to people they’re like “if I got over this, my partner would leave me.” It’s irrational, but it’s like “I need to be in a situation where I’m helpless and need to be saved. Otherwise, my partner’s going to leave.” Again, this isn’t the only way people get love and connection through this, but it’s just one of the ways that I’ve found to happen quite regularly.
I think both of these can be applicable concepts when talking about food cravings, when looking at why people have issues around food, but it’s not just about this. It can be applied to all different areas of life.
If we move on from cravings and now look at food addiction, what I want to do to start with is to look at drug addiction and the war on drugs, because I think this gives you a real idea of my position on food addiction. I would also add to that that considering drug addiction is often the thing that food addiction is compared to, I’ll hopefully show some of the holes in these kind of ideas.
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If you go back to the 18th of June, 1971, President Nixon held a press conference, and it was on this day that he declared drug abuse was Public Enemy No. 1. This is what started what was known as the war on drugs, and it’s really been going on ever since.
Part of the impetus for this was the Vietnam War. During the Vietnam War, the number of soldiers that were using opiate products on a regular basis was worryingly high. In the early stages of war, some marijuana was being used fairly commonly, but from about 1969 onwards, heroin and opium became much more of an issue.
There was a report that was done in 1971 that estimated that half of U.S. soldiers had tried opiates, and another report from that same year claimed that 15% of the troops were addicted. So the U.S. government were really concerned that when the war ended, there would be a steep rise in the number of addicts within America as these soldiers then returned home.
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This fear of addiction was largely based on a lot of experiments that were done on rats. There were lots of different experiments that were done, but they were all similar in their way of looking at things. Let me give you two examples.
First, Example 1: you put a rat in a cage on its own. It has two water bottles. One of those water bottles is just water; the other is water that is laced with heroin or cocaine or whatever drug they’re testing. As time goes on, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water and keep going back to it for more and more. Therefore, drugs are very addictive.
In Example 2, they put an injection apparatus into the back of the rat. They then tether it to the cage so it can’t move. Again, the rat is in a tiny cage and it’s on its own. They then provide the rat with a lever that, when it’s pressed, they get an injection of heroin or cocaine. Just like in the first example, the rats will continue to press that lever, therefore demonstrating how addictive drugs are.
The research was going along with these lines, and it was because of this that, with the Vietnam War, they were then thinking “My God, this is going to be the same thing that happens in humans.” But was this really correct? In the 1970s, there was a professor in psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander, and he decided to do his own experiments with rats and drugs. He noticed that the rats in the original experiments weren’t living in a realistic and normal way. They were put in cages alone and they had nothing to do but take drugs.
He wanted to see what would happen if you put rats in a different environment, so he built this thing called the Rat Park. It was over 200 times the floor area of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16 to 20 rats of different sexes in residence. There was an abundance of foods. There were balls and wheels for them to play on, enough space for them to be mating and raising litters. This was sort of Club Med for rats.
They took rats who had been force-fed morphine for up to 57 consecutive days in these tiny cages and they brought them into the Rat Park and released them into this new environment. They were then given the choice between plain tap water and water that was laced with morphine. For the most part, they would then choose the plain water and were able to kick their previous addiction.
To quote Professor Alexander, “Nothing we tried produced anything that looked like addiction in rats when housed in a reasonably normal environment.”
While this experiment was done in the 1970s, this had already been seen in real life in the earlier part of that decade. Ironically, the war on drugs was largely created because of the Vietnam War and the fear of what would happen when these people returned, but they actually saw the same response as they saw in the Rat Park. The vast majority of Vietnam vets who returned home immediately ceased opium use, and mostly without noticeable withdrawal symptoms.
Obviously availability played a role in this, but it wasn’t just that. By returning from a high-stress environment like a war zone in a foreign country to a low-stress environment – say the jubilation of being home, being with your family, with your friends – it eliminated the need for regular use of drugs, and would’ve on its own created its own high.
There’s this great TED Talk by a guy called Carl Hart, who is a professor at Columbia University. He’s known for his research on drug addiction and drug abuse. I’ll link to the talk in the show notes for this show. He talks about the fact that the majority of people who use illicit drugs are recreational users. This is for things like crack cocaine, for heroin – drugs that are meant to be so strong that you have them once and you’re instantly addicted.
He said that when he discovered this, he was just blown away, because this is not what everyone has been told. He had some statistics that something like 90% of people who are using illicit drugs aren’t drug addicts. I would say from other documentaries and other things I’ve watched, these figures are much, much higher than that.
So if drugs aren’t nearly as addictive as they’re made out to be, and especially drugs like crack cocaine and heroin, then what makes someone become an addict?
00:21:55
The answer to this very much is environmental factors. Another person who I really respect and like in this field is a guy called Dr. Gabor Maté. (I’m not sure how you pronounce his surname.) He’s a specialist in drug addiction. He works with addicts in Downtown Eastside in Vancouver.
In his book called In the Realm of the Hungry Ghost, he talks about the drug addicts that he sees, and he says that 99% of them have had absolutely horrific upbringings. They’ve been abused, they’ve had physical abuse, mental abuse, sexual abuse. They’re kids who were in foster homes, who had parents who were addicts, had parents who were prostitutes. Kids who became orphans. People who had just a huge amount of pain going on in their life, who really struggle with self-image and with self-worth.
What is interesting is when I read someone like Geneen Roth – and Geneen Roth is a person who works a lot with people with compulsive eating and with emotional eating – she draws the exact same parallels as with drug addiction. She puts on workshops all throughout the year, and she says that within her workshops, again, 90-95% of the people who are there are people who are coming to her who have had this same kind of horrible, tough, horrific upbringing – people who have been abused, people who have had parents die, had parents who were addicts, etc.
These are people who then end up being compulsive eaters or having issues around food, and a lot of this is coming from the fact that they’ve had such a terrible and troubled upbringing.
I don’t want to be making the assumption that anyone who becomes addicted to food or struggles with food or becomes a drug addict is because they’ve been abused or because they’ve had such a horrible upbringing. That’s definitely not the case. But it’s the fact that environmental factors are really the deciding factor in it. It’s not because drugs or food are just so inherently addictive that if you have that stuff, it’s like there’s no way you can get away from it.
00:24:15
If we look at why food often gets compared to drug addiction, a lot of it is because when you look at it from a brain perspective, it lights up a lot of the same pleasure centers in the brain as drugs do. When you eat food, when you eat sugar, when you eat chocolate, it lights up the same pleasure centers in the brain as when someone does heroin or cocaine.
There is a great website called Your Brain on Porn. Again, I’ll put the link in the show notes. As the name suggests, it looks at what happens when people watch porn, and more specifically what happens when someone becomes a porn addict. I would say it’s definitely worth looking at if someone’s wanting to understand more about the addiction process from a chemical perspective within the brain. This is definitely not the only part of it, but at least it explains that side of things, and it can explain why food and drugs can be put in the same category in terms of turning on certain processes within the brain.
But what I would add to that is just because something lights up the pleasure centers in the brain, doesn’t instantly mean that it is addictive. If we look at other things that light up pleasure centers in the brain – sex, carbohydrates, fats, water, sunlight, spending time in nature, meditation, music, dance, movement, exercise – if we are meant to be wary about all the things that light up the pleasure centers in the brain, then we should be also wary about all of these other things, and we should be then thinking about them as bad in the same way we think about highly addictive sugar and processed foods, etc.
But if you look at the reason behind why most of this stuff lights up the pleasure centers in the brain, it’s for the betterment of our species and for survival. If there was no pleasure from eating, we wouldn’t have that same desire to go out and find food. I know we now live in a society where there’s abundance and there’s food on our doorsteps and you can get it anywhere you turn, but that hasn’t always been the way. The same thing with sex. If there was no enjoyment that came from sex, then we wouldn’t be doing it and we wouldn’t be able to procreate as a species. So a lot of the things that light up the pleasure centers in our brain are there from a survival perspective.
I think just to say because sugar or junk food lights up these pleasure centers that it’s just as addictive as drugs is really wrong. And don’t get me wrong – there is a lot of evidence to show that eating highly palatable foods like processed foods can make people overconsume calories. But to go from this place to a place where food has become addictive takes other environmental factors, like deprivation or abuse or choosing food for emotional reasons. It’s not the food on its own.
In the movie Fed Up, which is the movie produced by Mark Hyman, a lot of the focus is on the fact that food that is fed to kids at school is just such poor quality. This is something I definitely do agree with, because availability does have an impact on consumption. If you’re in a situation where the only food that’s fed to you during the day is fast food, or that’s the only thing that’s available, then that’s what kids are going to eat. If better quality food is made available, then yeah, they’re going to probably eat the better quality food.
This part I definitely do agree with, but to then say that the problem is because sugar is more addictive than cocaine is hyperbole and really sensationalist tactics.
If we go back to Dr. Gabor Maté’s book, he actually tells a really personal account of this about his own struggles with addiction. You want to know what his struggles with addiction were? It’s not alcohol, it’s not drugs, it’s not sex, it’s not gambling. It’s buying classical music CDs.
He talks about the phases that he goes through with this as an addiction in terms of buying classical music CDs and going to different shops, where he should be at a meeting, where he should be helping out a client. He talks about the fact that during someone’s birth, where he was meant to be there helping with the birth, he left them and told them an excuse that he had to go visit some other client, and then spent time out buying CDs. He talks about he’ll have days or weeks where he’s spending thousands of dollars at a time on classical CDs, and having to hide them in his car, hide them in the attic, hide them from his wife.
It’s really strange when I was reading this, because it really starts to make you rethink about addiction. Most people just think, “It can’t be. How can you be addicted to buying classical CDs?” But he explains the whole process with it, and his addiction with that is the exact same as someone with a heroin addiction or someone with a cocaine addiction or a drug addiction. It is the same process. He has the same things go through his body, the same thought processes, etc.
What this really demonstrates is at the heart of addiction, it’s about changing someone’s state and someone using whatever substance or whatever means as their best way of coping with the situation. For so many people, this ends up being food, but it could so easily be something else.
00:29:55
Why, then, is it more likely these days that food ends up being the thing that people are “addicted to”? I think from my perspective, it’s because food is no longer food anymore. How someone eats is a statement about who they are. Food has become just so linked into someone’s body weight, and for so many, how much they weigh and how they look is a direct link into their self-worth. For a lot of people, it’s the most important determiner of their self-worth.
In our society of thin privilege and really stigmatizing fat people, this has a real role to play in why people feel so crazy around food. Food in our society has become this real dichotomy between an abundance and deprivation, between pleasure and then restraint and willpower. There’s just such mixed messages about it that it’s become this huge focal point in people’s life when it really doesn’t need to be.
Really, the best way to make someone crazy around food and to feel powerless around it is to deprive themselves of it – and deprive themselves both from a physical perspective, but also from an emotional perspective. Because if you do that and you keep that up long enough, it then just leads to people eventually giving in and consuming and then feeling like a failure and coming up with the assumption that food is addictive and “I can’t control my cravings and I’m powerless around food.”
I think that for a lot of people, problems with food are much more socially acceptable than drug problems. Often when I’m talking to clients, when I compare what they’re going through to drug addiction, I can see them recoil. They hate that comparison. There’s this feeling of like “I don’t do drugs. Drugs are bad.” So for many people, drugs are totally off-limits because of their beliefs around drugs, but something like food, well, that’s more okay.
I would say with food, there is no avoiding it. You can live a life where you don’t do drugs. You can live a life where you never smoke or you never gamble or you never drink alcohol. But you can’t live a life where you don’t eat food. It means that that thing is always going to be at the forefront, so it’s much more likely that that’s then going to be an issue.
While I do think that food can have addictive properties, so can lots of activities in our lives that we don’t label as addictive. For me, calling food addictive really gives so much power to it. It takes away our sense of control. It leads to more fear around food. This worry and panic is what tends to lead people to have issues around food that eventually get called addiction.
Rather than thinking of the substance, i.e. food or drugs or gambling, as being the issue, I tend to see it as someone’s coping mechanism. Simply removing that substance doesn’t really change anything. You’ve now just removed someone’s crutch.
The real way of dealing with it is understanding why someone is making the choices that they are. What are they trying to deal with? What are they trying to avoid? Rather than just removing the food, what are you trying to deal with here, and what could we be doing in different ways or how could we be thinking about this differently so you’re not needing to do this?
There’s a great quote in The Realm of the Hungry Ghost that states, “Addiction has biological, chemical, neurological, physiological, medical, emotional, social, political, economic, and spiritual underpinnings, and perhaps others I haven’t thought about. To get anywhere near a complete picture, we must keep shaking the kaleidoscope to see what other patterns emerge.”
To me, this just really sums up the multifaceted nature of addiction. Ignoring all this and just throwing the problem solely at the feet of food being so addictive really misses all of this. You’re then getting into the same realm as the war on drugs, and “if we just cut off the drug supply, we’re going to be able to solve the problem.” If you look at how successful the war on drugs has really been, you’ll realize it’s been pretty much a total disaster and it hasn’t helped to deal with the problem of drug addiction.
That’s it for the podcast for today. I know some of that was maybe a little bit heavy, but from my perspective, I really want people to be changing their relationship with food. For a lot of that, it means getting away from the fear of food and the fear of food being so addictive and starting to look at what’s going on in someone’s life and why people are choosing to eat the way that they do, and why someone is getting the cravings – is it from an emotional perspective, is it from a physiological perspective, etc.
Until next time, have a good week, and I’ll catch you then.
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