Breaking the Cycle of Addiction

Our culture is prone to addiction. We are addicted to drugs, alcohol, smoking, food, shopping, sex, Sunday football ... you name it. Almost everyone has some sort of addiction. We seem to depend upon and even subconsciously enjoy these addictions as they provide a much needed source of identity, comfort and sense of self.

Within the addicted psyche, there is a sense of "lack". That sense of lack drives consumption as we seek to fill the void with something to soothe us. Sometimes it is alcohol or drugs. Often it is food. Some foods are more likely to be addictive. Sugar, fat, and salt are the worst offenders. The huge food and drug corporations have basically used these poisons to control our food purchasing and fatten their bottom line. The most profitable aisle of the grocery store happens to be the cereal section where tons of cheap, low-quality grains are loaded with sugars, coloring and flavorings to appeal to the youngest of shoppers and feed a growing sugar addiction in the most vulnerable, our children. The Big Food Industry is causing a health crisis across the planet.

Take a minute and imagine, if you will, a big pile of cauliflower or a mountain of apple slices. Do you know anyone that would binge on the cauliflower or apple slices? When you change the image to a pile of cookies or a mountain of potato chips, the response changes. It becomes easy to imagine someone who cannot help eating the last chip or munching all the cookies. Let's look at what the difference is between these two scenarios.

Many doctors and nutritional specialists believe it is caused by a certain irresistible combination of sugar, fats, and salt. Some experts believe that 'food science' has perfected this toxic combining to make saying no to these addictive foods extremely difficult, if not impossible. Volatile chemical compounds assault our taste buds with artificial flavorings to make even "low sugar" foods taste sweet and the chips with low sodium levels taste salty. Everything has more flavor, actually dulling our taste buds to the point that healthy foods may taste bland and undesirable. Fresh vegetables and fruits are certainly not something you want to grab when you need a pick-me-up or a mood changer.

Sugar Blues, a book written in 1975 by William Duffy, documents how we became addicted to sugar. The process is the same for salt and fats. We are talking physical addiction here folks ... just like the addiction caused by heroin! What is just becoming apparent now is the extent of the biological and very real food addiction that people who are overweight or eat unhealthy foods experience. Addiction is a disease and choice or restraint is not an option. It must be treated and the addiction healed.

"Sugar is the biggest public health crisis in the history of the world," says Dr. Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco. His 2009 speech "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" has received more than 2.5 million hits on YouTube. In a paper published in 2015 in the journal Nature, Lustig and his colleagues provoked debate when they stated that sugar is so harmful, it should be regulated like alcohol and tobacco. "Every substance of abuse – cocaine, heroin, you name it – has required personal or social intervention," says Lustig. "For sugar we have nothing, and my prediction is that we will need both."

Let's look at sugar addiction briefly, as it is the primary culprit on which the others rely.

Sugar in all its forms is the root cause of our obesity epidemic and most of the chronic disease sucking the life out of American citizens and the economy (and increasingly the world). You name it; it's caused by sugar. Heart disease, cancer, dementia, type 2 diabetes, anxiety, depression. Even acne, infertility, impotence, and Alzheimers have all been linked to obsessive sugar intake.

You cannot win by reading labels, as there are dozens of names for hidden sugars. Processed foods rarely have just one sugar, but many, and most are disguised under strange unfamiliar names we would never think of for sugar. Names we don't recognize like erythritol, barley malt, dextrose, maltose, sucrose, brown rice syrup, fruit juice concentrate and on and on. The average American consumes over 150 pounds of sugars a year!

That's roughly 22 teaspoons every day for every person in America. In addition, our kids consume about 34 teaspoons (that's more than two 20-ounce sodas a day) making nearly one in four teenagers pre-diabetic or diabetic.

Sadly, (because we all love a great loaf of bread) flour is nothing more than another form of sugar because it is metabolized quickly into sugar in the body. Grains are a fairly new addition to the human diet and not a good one. Eating flour in breads and pastas compounds the sugars we get from processed foods and baked goods. Americans consume about 146 pounds of flour a year. An important but unknown fact is that flour raises blood sugar even more than table sugar because of how it is digested in the body. This is true for almost all flours, even whole-wheat and whole-grain flours. Estimates for sugar consumption are between 150-170 pounds per year per American. If we stop to think about it – that's 296 pounds per year for both using the lower estimate. That is just under one pound of sugar and flour consumed daily for every man, woman and child in America!

Here's a shocking fact: sugar is eight times as physically addictive as cocaine! In tests, rats will choose sugar water over food, sex and any other substance until it kills them.

Sugar in all its forms (including flour) is the reason nearly 70 percent of Americans and 40 percent of kids are overweight. In one study, Harvard scientists found that a high sugar milkshake (compared to a low sugar one) not only spiked blood sugar and insulin and led to more sugar cravings, but caused huge changes in the brain. The sugar lit up the addiction center called the nucleus accumbens in the brain. These biological changes are easy to see and measure with brain scans and blood tests. They are real!

Do you have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes? Ninety percent of these disorders go undiagnosed. Do you have belly fat? Are you overweight? Crave sugar and carbs? Have trouble losing weight? Have you...