https://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-l...s-not-addictive
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The Truth About Neural Reward Pathways
People say that eating sugar lights up neural reward pathways, just like it does with drugs. Sure, but these same pathways also light up from sex, working out, and playing video games.
However, it's the act of doing those things that lights up your brain circuitry like the Vegas strip – not the substance. Therefore, you can't go nutritional Sherlock Holmes on us and say that sugar, since it lights up the same pathways as drugs, is addictive.
If something has addictive qualities, it implies that it has some intrinsic property that makes susceptible people fall in psychological but mostly chemical love with it. Sugar has no such intrinsic properties.
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People argue against sugar being addictive because it isn't heroin. By that metric--is tobacco addictive? Also, sex, exercise, video games--giving examples of things that are not, strictly speaking, bio-active chemicals is silly. Video games could be slot machines, if you don't think those deserve to be called "addictive," well, I don't know where you got that idea. This is an argument by classification. It's true that the DSMV calls gambling a compulsive disorder rather than an addiction.
Making something "psychological" rather than chemical, maybe that's fine. The problem arises with the idea that this distinction is supposed to have anything to do with the degree of difficulty in fighting the compulsion. Compare heroin to sugar, okay. Compare tobacco to a more serious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or tourette's--not so easy say that chemical dependency is harder to control than "psychological."
One of the article's headings;
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You Don't See Spiders When You Stop Using Sugar
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is trying to be funny, but would you expect to see spiders when you stop smoking? Quitting smoking is hard, but it doesn't have to look like heroin withdrawal.
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Yes, sugar is a big problem. It's a leading contributor to obesity. It can lead to diabetes, and heart and liver disease, but if you can't stop yourself from eating it, or giving it some medical power that it doesn't possess, well, that's on you.
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Taubes has a quote he uses a lot, paraphrased, "whether sugar is addictive or not, we act as if it were addictive." A
relatively mild set of withdrawal symptoms when people quit sugar isn't really something I take as proof that sugar is non-addictive. Even if it was--what does that say about what our response should be?
I guess his point could be that if you think it's addictive, maybe you'll give it too much power over you. That's a question for science, do people who assume sugar is addictive have more trouble quitting, or less? How do you parse that out--it's possible that people who think sugar is addictive think it's addictive because they're genuinely addicted to it, so does their opinion cause the result, or did their experience inform their opinion? I would have an easier time quitting my two shots of rum a week than an alcoholic would. If I had only my own experience to go by, I'd have to say that alcohol is non-addictive. Some threads have come up here about carb-ups or cheats, battle lines get drawn between abstainers and moderators, I think abstainers are largely people who found they
couldn't moderate.
The "debate:" is sugar addictive?
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