Month: April 2013

Sugar: Addictive Substance for Food Addicts

As food addicts, most of us find we have to pay a great deal of attention to what is in the content of the food we eat. Unlike alcoholics and drug addicts, we cannot just “stop eating.” However, we do have to surrender our binge foods and addictive eating habits as part of our recovery.

After making a list of our binge foods, we can identify the substances that we are addicted to in order to surrender them to our Higher Power so that we don’t have to eat them anymore.

“Surrender,” in this context, means doing something we don’t want to do in order to recover. Many of us are not able to surrender our binge foods without the structure and support of other abstinent food addicts.

Despite what we are doing to our bodies because of our food addiction, many of us are unable to remember what the addiction is actually doing to us. We can only remember how “good” it tastes. This is called “euphoric recall,” and is a classic symptom of addiction.

How do you know if you are addicted to sugar or flour?

The simplest way is to use the test provided by the book Alcoholics Anonymous, written eighty years ago. We can just change the text from using “alcohol” to using “food:”

Try some controlled eating. Step into a bakery and have one piece of candy, one donut, one piece of binge food, and then stop. Stick to a diet and maintain your weight loss.

Try it more than once. If you are like us, you will no more be able to do this than an alcoholic can step into a bar and have one beer.

Check out our self-assessment questions on Am I a Food Addict?  Also read about different types of eaters so you can come to your own conclusions.

If you think you might be a food addict, then you need to know a lot more about what foods are the most likely to be addictive, even though you may not want to give them up. Most food addicts don’t want to give up their binge foods; they just want to avoid the consequences of eating.

For the purposes of this article, we will address sugar and flour, the two most common substances that food addicts become addicted to. Although some food addicts report addictions to fatty, salty and volumes of food we will address those substances in a later article.

Sugar

Sugar is a carbohydrate, and we often think of it only as the white or brown stuff, but sugar is also a natural part of many other foodstuffs such as lactose in milk, maltose in grain, fructose in fruit, sucrose (refined sugar), and more.

The simple refined carbohydrate, crystalline table sugar, is first extracted from sugar cane with the bulk and fiber being left behind. It is then purified, filtered, concentrated, and boiled down to sugar crystals produced out of the syrup. Substances such as sulfur dioxide, milk of lime, carbon dioxide, charcoal from charred beef bones, and calcium carbonate are used in this industrial refining process as purifying agents.

Flour is also a refined carbohydrate, and for many of us who are addicted to sugar, we find that flour acts in our bodies the same way sugar does: it gives us a “high.” Often flour and sugar come together in a food package – equivalent to high-quality crack cocaine to a food addict.

Brown sugar is simple white sugar with a bit of molasses added back in, or colored with caramel.

The food industry has developed enormous sidelines of “diet” food, usually labeled “Sugar-Free” and “Fat-Free.” Given the many different varieties of sugar, derivations of sugar such as Splenda, sugars formed from alcohol (not surprisingly, these can be very addictive), chemical sweeteners, (the “polys”) artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, saccharine, etc., the label “Sugar-Free” usually means the food industry is simply using a different kind of sugar. For some food addicts, these non-sugars can have the same impact as refined sugar: the inability to eat reasonable amounts.

Conversely, it is worth noting that many of the foods labeled “Fat-Free” are loaded with sugar. And “Fat-Free” certainly doesn’t mean calorie-free.

Sugar is rapidly converted in the blood to fat (triglycerides), which increases obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. It is devoid of vitamins, minerals, or fiber; it is an empty food. Its main purpose in the food industry is a stabilizer, flavor enhancer and appetite stimulant.

In 1973, the per capita consumption of sugar and other highly refined sweeteners (such as high-fructose corn syrup) was 126 pounds a year. Today, it’s 158 pounds – an increase of 26 percent. During the same time period, the percent of overweight Americans increased by nearly 20 percent.

Here is a list of types of sugar that are commonly found in foods we find in most grocery stores. Many labels list more than one kind of sugar; only the total grams of sugar give a true idea of how much is actually in the package. Although some artificial sweeteners have no caloric value, their impact on our bodies can be just as deadly as those with calories, if we cannot stop eating it.

  • amasake
  • apple sugar
  • Barbados sugar
  • bark sugar
  • barley malt
  • beet sugar
  • brown sugar
  • brown rice sugar
  • buttered syrup
  • evaporated cane juice, or cane-juice crystals (non-FDA approved terms for sugar)
  • cane sugar
  • caramel
  • carob syrup
  • chicory syrup (non-FDA approved terms (non GRAS and non-CFR compliant) for high fructose syrup)
  • corn sweetener
  • corn syrup
  • corn syrup solids
  • date sugar
  • dextrin
  • dextrose (refined corn sugar)
  • diatase
  • diastatic malt
  • Diglycerides
  • Disaccharides
  • D-tagalose
  • ethyl maltol
  • Florida crystals
  • fructan
  • Fructooligosaccharides (FOS)
  • fructose
  • fruit juice
  • fruit juice concentrate
  • Galactose
  • Glucitol
  • Glucoamine
  • Gluconolactone
  • glucose
  • glucose solids
  • Glucose polymers
  • Glucose syrup
  • Glycerides
  • Glycerine
  • Glycerol
  • Glycol
  • Hexitol
  • golden sugar
  • golden syrup
  • grape sugar
  • high-fructose corn syrup
  • honey
  • inulin syrup (non-FDA approved terms (non GRAS and non-CFR compliant) for high fructose syrup)
  • inversol
  • invert sugar
  • isomalt
  • invert sugar
  • karo syrup
  • lactose
  • lactitol ++
  • levulose
  • malt syrup
  • malted barley
  • maltodextrin (derived from the corn “wet refining” process)
  • maltose ++
  • malitol ++
  • mannitol ++
  • maple syrup
  • microcrystalline cellulose
  • molasses
  • Monoglycerides
  • Monosaccarides
  • Nectars
  • Pentose
  • Polydextrose++
  • Powdered sugar
  • Raisin juice
  • Raisin syrup
  • raw sugar
  • refiner’s syrup
  • rice malt
  • rice syrup
  • saccharides
  • sorbitol ++
  • sorghum
  • Sorghum syrup
  • Sucanat
  • Sucanet
  • sucrose (from cane or beet)
  • sugar cane
  • trisaccharides
  • turbinado sugar
  • xylitol ++
  • yellow sugar
  • zylose

++ Sugar alcohols aren’t sugars or artificial sweeteners. The name “sugar alcohols” comes from the fact that their structure resembles sugar, and they’re chemically similar to alcohol. They’re typically genetically modified from corn or wheat.

Those food addicts who are also addicted to or have an allergy to wheat receive a double impact from sugar alcohols.

Experts say that sugar alcohols can cause stomach cramps, bloating, diarrhea, and anal leakage, because our bodies poorly absorb them. In large quantities, they’re non-GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) and some research shows that they can cause cancer.

Foods with average added sugars

  • Applesauce contains 11 g
  • Peanut Butter contains 18g
  • Flavored Yogurt contains 23g
  • Fruit drinks contain 40g

A single can of soda contains 12 teaspoons of added sugar. That’s 120 percent of the USDA’s recommended daily intake of sugar.

In 2005, researchers examined the impact of sugar on the immune system. A published study at the National Institute of Health documented the impact of sugar intake on the immune system: Sugar steals the ability of white blood cells to destroy bacteria. White blood cells are known as “phagocytes” and phagocytic tests show that a couple of teaspoons of sugar can sap their strength by 25 percent. A large helping of pie and ice cream renders your white cells 100 percent helpless. This effect lasts from 4 to 5 hours. Consider a 900 ml serving of processed and packaged orange juice or one 683 ml of cola—either of these will depress the immune system by 50 percent, 30 minutes after ingestion and this will last for hours! Consider if you have sugar at every meal, which many do by eating processed foods alone, that the immune system is constantly ineffectual.

For food addicts, who binge on enormous amounts of sugar, eat meals consisting of large amounts of processed food, or diets consisting almost totally of binge foods, the impact could be exponential. For us, to eat this way is to die.

© A.E. Heald, M.Div.

Bulimia & Food Addiction

Food addiction begins with physical craving, evolves into mental obsession, and, ultimately, becomes a whole life of spiritual illness. It is also a physical disease of chemical dependency upon one or more foods or on volumes of food in general.

Bulimia is a psychological illness, a mental-emotional problem usually rooted in unresolved trauma from before the earliest incident of purging.

It is fairly straight forward to know if you are bulimic. Do you binge and purge?

Do you keep doing this after you decided to stop? More specifically, do you physically vomit food that you have eaten when you are not sick? Or do you use pills, ipecac, laxatives or diuretics to try to take off weight? Or do you exercise excessively – sometimes to the point of hurting yourself – to try and control weight? Do you use highly restrictive dieting over and over again? These are the most common physical symptoms of bulimia. If you are not sure if you are bulimic, you can ask a doctor or eating disorder specialist for a diagnosis.

How does a bulimic know if they suffer from food addiction?

One simple indication is if they were obsessing about and/or bingeing out of control on commonly addictive foods before they started purging. The “food drug” to which people most often become addicted is sugar in one of its myriad forms. The second most common “food drug” is flour and other refined carbohydrates which metabolize quickly into simple sugars. Further addictive food substances may include: chocolate, excess fat, wheat, artificial sweeteners, salt, caffeine and a large volume of any food.

Sometimes addiction to volume is simply another form of sugar addiction, but there is also a separate process in which people do not have the normal bio-chemical sensation of satiation.

If someone was binge-eating before they became bulimic, it is usually clear that this is a primary mental-emotional complication of bulimia nervosa. But is this binge-eating due to psychological problems? Or is it the beginning of chemical dependency? Or is it both?

This is sometimes less easy to discern. One possible indication of food addiction is that there are symptoms of detoxification when specific binge foods are completely eliminated. If the person has food cravings soon after abstaining and wants to eat to deal with the cravings, this is an even stronger sign of addiction to that particular food.

Not all bulimics are food addicted, but, for the many who are, understanding and treating their chemical dependency on food is essential to long term recovery from bulimia. Abstinence and recovery helps develop better emotional skills and enables healing of primary trauma.

If you do not want to abstain from all binge foods completely, there is another way of seeing if you are food addicted. When you try to eat all foods in moderation and find that you still want to binge even when you work at dealing with underlying feelings, this could be because you are also chemically dependent on food. It will take some time to be sure about this, of course, for it can take months or years of intensive work to develop strong emotional skills and work through all unresolved trauma.

One test: have you been doing therapy for a year or more for your eating disorder and are you still bingeing and purging? If so, it might be useful to look more seriously at food addiction, because you may not just be medicating feelings; you may also be biochemically addicted.

Treating Food Addiction

To treat food addiction, it is important to begin by detoxifying from all binge foods and eliminate the physical cravings for them. This means abstaining from all trigger foods completely. You can identify the foods you are addicted to and get support for detoxification exactly like other food addicts, though the bulimic often commits to abstaining from purging as well as specific foods. The Twelve Step fellowships (such as Overeaters Anonymous and Food Addicts Anonymous) are excellent support programs for this process. ACORN workshops are designed to help those who need additional professional help.

We have a number of people working in ACORN who are bulimic and have spent a year – sometimes several years – in therapy for their eating disorders. These bulimics said that although they had been helped in dealing with their feelings, their eating was still out of control. Often their therapist had said that they “should” be able to eat in moderation or that the rigor of committing food to a sponsor every day and weighing and measuring was “too rigid.” However, when they tried treating themselves as if they were addicted, their cravings diminished. They were better able to deal with difficult feelings, and they came to see that they had a food addiction.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about food addiction – even in the medical community. It is not taught at all in many medical schools or graduate programs for dieticians and the differences between bulimia and food addiction are seldom clarified for counselors and therapists.

Questions for Bulimics to Ask

Do I ever think of purging without bingeing first?

If you always plan on bingeing – especially if the binge is on addictive foods – before you purge, then the primary problem may be the food, and the underlying problem may well be chemical dependency. Food addiction is a primary disease, just like addiction to alcohol or drugs. If someone is drinking out of control and depressed, the alcoholic must begin by putting down the drink and accepting that he or she is an alcoholic. If one is medicating feelings with pot or some prescription medication, the drug addict must first put down the drug. For most, there is usually much more emotional and spiritual work to do, but this is not possible while still self-medicating with an addictive substance. It is the same with food addiction.

Another basic question helps you see the difference: Would you suggest to an alcoholic or drug addict that they work on underlying therapeutic issues while they are still using alcohol, cocaine, or some other drug of choice? Well, some foods have exactly the same opiates as in these more socially identified addictive drugs.

The best way for you to tell if you are addicted to food is to treat yourself as if you are food addicted for six months to a year.

  1. First, look at your own eating experience and identify foods and eating behaviors to which you may be addicted.
  2. Second, get the support – from peers and or professionals – to eliminate those foods entirely and to make abstinence the number one priority in your life.
  3. Third, continue to work on any difficult feelings, irrational thoughts and deeper spiritual issues that pull you back to the food.

If you are able to stay abstinent – or, if you make substantial improvement in dealing with food – it’s likely that you are food addicted. If you are not, you are still making progress.