Real Talk | Food Addiction

20 Nov Real Talk | Food Addiction

I think I can explain food addiction and sugar addiction, because that’s really what we’re speaking of is a high fructose corn syrup addiction. Okay. But there is addictions to other food. And you’ll hear hints of this when people come in “Oh, I’m under stress, which is why I’m eating the cakes, the cookies.” Well, it’s somewhat of addiction because you’re under stress.

Your body’s creeping out a little bit of cortisol and it’s looking for something to ease the burden of that stress. And that stress that we normally turn to is food, but we don’t understand what is happening when we consume that corn fructose, the sugar, the stuff that makes us say, “God, that was good.” That is called a dopamine release.

We are releasing a low level of dopamine in our brain and the prefrontal cortex that says, Oh God, I finally got some relief with that dopamine surge. Then we have a little serotonin back in up saying, Oh, why not? You deserve it. So you go right ahead and have it. So now we’re talking ourselves into it. Here lies the danger of it.

And this is where addiction comes in. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about addiction to high fructose corn syrup , methamphetamines, hydrocodone, OxyContin, because it all follows the same pathway is that it takes more to make the addiction to get the “ahh” release. So it always starts out has one sugary drink, sweet tea, high fructose corn syrup. It does not matter which beverage you choose, but it is starting out as one, then one becomes two.

Why did it have to become two? Because you needed more sugar to get the little “Ahh” and you’re still feeling it at that level. But that goes on for a couple of weeks, maybe a month, maybe two months. Now we got to go up to three to get the same “ahh” feeling. Next thing you know, we’re up to ten a day and this is where it becomes out of control.

And then to get you to stop, you actually go through withdrawal because all of a sudden you’ve taken this away. Where’s my dopamine? Where’s my serotonin? I am not getting the rush that I deserve. All right. So we work through it. We get off it, and then all of a sudden, maybe a couple of years later, when I’m going to try that drink one more time and we take a drink of it, it’s like, Jesus, this thing is so incredibly sweet.

Yeah, but you are drinking ten of them a day. How did you do that? And it was because of your addictive behavior. You have to understand addiction and addiction to foods in order to comprehend. This is really kind of interesting, because to break addiction, a lot of people don’t know this. It is only indigenous to the human population.

A lot of people don’t know that animals, rats, laboratory mice that we make addicted to a substance and drugs. They will continue with using it to they till they die. Humans are different. We have a higher level of functioning that is called reason. We reason it out why we have to stop. We reason out why this is bad for us.

And we’re able to come up with, okay, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, but if you’re not a human and a primate, a chimpanzee, a snake, a dog, a mouse, you will feed that addiction till it kills you and you will not stop. Now, I’m not saying that doesn’t happen in humans. It does. Okay? The addiction is there and the possibility is for humans to become so addictive that the brain does not recognize anything, not even its own safety for its own body because of this addiction.

And if you stop and think about it, that’s kind of long with food, too, because we’re doing these things we know are bad for us, but we’re still doing it. So we’re jeopardizing our own health because of this addiction.