“We’re all prone to try to excuse our behaviour by claiming we’re addicted. Which is rubbish.”



Can you get hooked on sugar?

Let’s say you manage to use your willpower to get on top of your craving for that chocolate bar. But the feeling does not go away.

Your mouth runs dry. You can taste the first bite. Your work performance drops. It’s just like ... (you think wistfully to yourself) ... craving a cigarette.

Maybe the similarities run deeper than that.

In world-first research, Queensland University of Technology neuroscientist Professor Selena Bartlett claims to have found evidence that high-sugar diets act on the brain in very similar ways to tobacco, alcohol or other physically addictive substances.

Her work targets the basolateral amygdala, a small region in the brain that is linked to fear and stress, and the prefrontal cortex, which sits at the front of the brain.

She found that mice who had binged on sugar had far fewer links between the neurons in these regions and looked a lot like animals addicted to alcohol.

More remarkably, when her researchers gave mice a medication used to treat nicotine addiction, they stopped eating as much sugar.

“What we discovered in the last five years is that sugar is as addictive as alcohol. We nailed a very specific set of circuits in the brain that alcohol and nicotine bind to,” Professor Bartlett says.

“We showed sugar using the same protocols could change the brain in exactly the same way as alcohol and nicotine do, which labels it into the addictive pathway.”

In a hotly contested field, claims about sugar’s addictive qualities are among the most fraught.

“When we look at obesity, we’re not finding those addictive qualities at all. Where’s the evidence for that?,” says Professor John Dixon, a researcher with the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute.

“More than any other disease, people believe they know what causes obesity. They don’t.”

Even University of NSW Professor Margaret Morris, one of the leading proponents of the theory that sugar can damage the brain, says the evidence for actual addiction is weak.

“We did a review of the evidence and we had to conclude, on the balance of evidence, that there was no strong evidence for sugar addiction in humans.

“We’re all prone to try to excuse our behaviour by claiming we’re addicted. Which is rubbish.”