Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Sugar More Addictive Than Cocaine

According to a new research study, refined sugar is far more addictive than cocaine -- one of the most addictive and harmful substances currently known.

An astonishing 94 percent of rats who were allowed to choose mutually-exclusively between sugar water and cocaine, chose sugar. Even rats who were addicted to cocaine quickly switched their preference to sugar, once it was offered as a choice. The rats were also more willing to work for sugar than for cocaine.

The researchers speculate that the sweet receptors (two protein receptors located on the tongue), which evolved in ancestral times when the diet was very low in sugar, have not adapted to modern times’ high-sugar consumption.

Therefore, the abnormally high stimulation of these receptors by our sugar-rich diets generates excessive reward signals in the brain, which have the potential to override normal self-control mechanisms, and thus lead to addiction.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

My rhymes got nutritional value
I get it how I live, it's critical when the conditions allow you
Do you don't trust the critics who doubt you
Try to write shit about you, but they can't make a living without you
Go hungry, you gotta watch what the media feed ya
And don't be a poisoned animal eater either
It's harder than it sound, cause nowadays, put that swine in everything
The white sugar so addictive it's pure 'caine
They got, pork in the toothpaste, soda in the Sunny D
Jello brand gelatin is laced with the lecatin
In Africa they starvin, over here the food hurt you
Cows goin mad and the chickens crunk with bird flu
It's too ill how the food kill it's like blue steel
Lies never set you free, but the truth will
The truth still matter the proof is in the batter or the pudding
You can tell we eatin good, we gettin fatter

-Talib Kweli

If ya'll aint' peeped this cats new album, NOW is the time. :-)

Denmark Vesey said...

Damn, I like Kimberly.

Anonymous said...

This is what's wrong with children in school. not ADD.

all them damn snacks in a prepackaged baggie. (the snack aisle at any store will send you into a kind of crack-esque sugar fit)

this year at my daughters elementary they tell parents to bring a snack and a lunch.

i never heard of brining a snack to school when i was a kid. the snack is so powerful I can bribe my children with it to get ready on time and without incident.

crack (snack) kills.

cnulan said...

Everytime I see my chirren get highn'a'muhfukka on sugar, it makes me think about what an extraordinary and unprecedented impact the introduction of mass quantities of sugar must've had on the climate of consciousness on continental europe when it began to be imported in significant quantities from the New World a few centuries ago....,

Denmark Vesey said...

Cnulan.

Damn. That might have been the "Intellectually Aggressive Thought Of The Day".

I like that. Where you been man?

cnulan said...

Unfortunately, I've been busy in the salt mines today..., in the interstice, I had to get off a post about the call for 10K men on the streets in Philly.

But to the above, I think it would make one helluv'n interesting historical narrative to attempt to reconstruct/survey the collective effects and motivations arising in the old world from the introduction of mass quantities of sugar, caffeine, nicotine, etc...,

We know at least one of the major effects this addiction had on our own history;

However, a much larger scale production of sugarcane shifts across the Atlantic to America with the introduction of sugarcane to Santo Domingo on Columbus' second voyage in 1493. Eventually, America will surpass Mediterranean sugarcane industry as huge plantations will spread to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Sugarcane also made inroads with indigo in the Portuguese colony of Brazil. In conjunction with industrialization in Europe the habit of sugar consumption with coffee, tea, and rum will become a drug-like addiction involving sugar, alcohol, and tobacco. Europeans and eventually the world, as it industrializes, will, without much alarm or perceptions of dangers of abuse, feed one of the largest cash crops and food businesses in the world. Cacao like tea and coffee contains a stimulant and is combined with vanilla , milk products, and sugar to produce a sweet with supposed aphrodisiac properties called chocolate this is only one aspect of sugars impact and importance.

The initial labor for sugarcane plantations in America will fall on Native Americans, but by 1600 95 % of Native Americans in the Caribbean and Atlantic Coast populations will be dead, mainly due to disease and labor. African slavery will replace the Native American slave labor and by 1888 9.5 million African people will be enslaved in the Americas. The Caribbean plantations will dominate in sugarcane and slaves, but Portuguese Brazil will always be a strong competitor to the Spanish and other Europeans in the Caribbean. The Southeastern United States in colonial times and as part of the United States will also operate plantations dominated with sugarcane and sorghum production of sugar. The cruelty and exploitation of these slave plantation systems will, driven by unprecedented greed, bring the entire African slave trade aspect to a halt by the late 1880s. In the case of French Haiti (called Saint Dominique) 450,000 African slaves will be persecuted so that a bloody fifteen year revolt will result in the only full take over of a colony in America by African slaves.

J.C. said...

Moderation.
Honey is suger, and that has been around a long time.

Stay clear of the sugar pops for breakfast.

A little organic sugar is tasty

Nothing too much.

Denmark Vesey said...

Nah Skip,

Honey is not refined sugar.

Refined sugar is denatured.

Anything denatured (God removed) kills.

J.C. said...

This is true, and if a natural law is broken eventually it breaks you.

However, a little sugar, not much, in chocolate or something in very moderate dose, like any drug, is not gonna kill ya, at least not right away.
Other wise we would be awful dead right now.

Denmark Vesey said...

You right Skip.

It wouldn't kill you.

A little meth wouldn't either, if you think about it. Still wouldn't give it to my kids.