Obviously, to all of us who live the American lifestyle, or any lifestyle in particular, sugar is present in our daily lives. With extensive manufacturing across just about everything with roots in the slave trade, sugar alters our brain chemistry, affects our communal psychology and even helps shapes some societal norms. It has been said to even have addictive-like properties. This begs the question: is sugar a drug?
This will not be answered in this article, for various reasons that will be discussed. And to even begin to formulate an opinion on that question, you first have to ask yourself: what is sugar? Sugar as it is generally used makes up a group of soluble carbohydrates often used in food, which are generally sweet tasting. Split into simple sugars, or monosaccharides, which are a single molecule of a sugar such as glucose, fructose, or galactose, and compound/double sugars, also called disaccharides, such as sucrose or lactose. Sugars are something we as humans have been taught to crave, from both edges of the nature vs. nurture sword, with our brain chemistry conditioning itself to enjoy them as they are what, as a budding species, was beneficial to us, being a source for quick easy energy. Nowadays, amounts of it are found in almost every food, which isn’t necessarily that bad, if it were in minute quantities, but it is definitely, unmistakably not.
Sugarcane, and sugar cultivation, began around the Indian subcontinent and near places, such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Refined with Arab technology it was introduced to much of the old world, but was generally hard and expensive to come by. However, in the colonial era, it was discovered that sugar makes a lot of other things European powers were pilfering from the world, such as tea, coffee, and chocolate, actually taste good, millions of slaves were forced to make sugar at high capacity for selling in rum and these other mediums to turn a gargantuan profit for slave owners. This resulted in sugar being introduced to many forms of consumption today, and, from 1700 to 1900, the average Englishman who previously ate about four pounds of sugar would become around 60-100 pounds annually. Today, a study by Natural Society from 2009 demonstrated that 50% of Americans consumed approximately 227 grams of sugar a day, equating to about 179.9 pounds a year.
So, are these signs of Americans being addicted to sugar? Well, sugar being in most everything we eat today is certainly not beneficial, and extremely high amounts being in places such as junk food and fast food, which are both cheaper and more easily accessible to the average person and generally promoted by society, with people often dismissing when they’re not, results in Americans being extremely susceptible to high sugar consumption. The bottom line is: eating healthy is harsh on your bottom line. It’s also difficult timewise, with healthy foods being harder to find, and just does not give the same dopamine response that eating sugary foods does.
So with both society and serotonin setting us up for failure, is this resulting in addiction? Addiction is a tricky term to use, with no clear concrete definition being in place, but is generally used to represent an extreme dependency on something resulting in abuse. Primarily delegated for abuses of drugs, addiction is occasionally expanded to refer to heightened vulnerability to activities such as sex, gambling, or even video games. Our brain has a complex reward system, which, to use a rudimentary explanation, basically signals to itself whether we should do something again. Pleasurable experiences release positive chemicals like dopamine, which leads us to associate liking something with wanting it. Drugs overload these reward systems, creating cravings that people can have trouble controlling, and feel overwhelmed and overly compelled to chase that feeling of heightened mental reward again, even though often one cannot replicate it, resulting in addiction. Sugar does the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale, which results in some people having trouble denying it. The Wall Street Journal depicted sugar winning over marijuana when it asked Americans to rank dangerous substances. Sugar doesn’t get boring, we always get the same heightened dopamine response from a bite of a cookie, so that leads to, in some people, a constant state of chasing, or at least desiring, this “sugar high”. Is this addiction? It’s hard to say, with what is classified as addiction and abuse being a blurry area that everyone has their own unique line drawn in the sand in. But it is certainly an important compound in the American lifestyle
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