About 2 years ago, I spent a couple of months doing research on sugar. Since then, I have not consumed any form of processed sugar, except for a few celebratory occasions. I have also observed other people trying to quit, with different motives. I wrote this article, because I believe that quitting for the wrong reasons increases the probability of relapse. This is quite common because most people do not invest time in educating themselves about humanity’s most widely deployed stimulant.

When it comes to quitting efforts, healthy eating has become a cliche. What is the point of losing weight for summer, just to gain it right away for winter? Sugar is a psychoactive substance, so the approach to quitting should be psychological, not dietary. That is what most people miss when they try to quit, and that is why they relapse.

With “sugar”, I encompass everything ranging from purified sugarcane sucrose to processed foodstuffs containing mixtures or compounds of glucose and fructose. I leave out fruits, except the ones that are consumed for their sugary content, such as oranges, granny smith apples, pineapples etc. Fructose-rich fruit juices also count, since they do more harm than they do good. After all, most fruits can be considered as processed food since they were selectively bred to be sweeter.

Sugar is a very sophisticated addictor

Used daily, most addictive substances have drastic effects on the human body. The worst ones are the hard drugs: meth, crack cocaine and heroin, whose damages are immediately detectable. The effects of alcohol and marijuana are less noticeable and rather manifest themselves behaviorally. Then comes caffeine and sugar which are much less regulated than the rest, and which the majority of the population uses on a daily basis. Compared to the bad actors, sugar only has a fraction of their physical and psychological effects. Thus, a person can consume large amounts of sugar on a daily basis and still be a functioning member of the society.

Being able to function does not imply sugar does not have its toll on health. On the contrary, sugar is the reason for obesity, lack of energy and mood swings. In the long run, it causes diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s. The physical and behavioral effects are not immediately noticeable, so there is no incentive for anyone to intervene. Everyone uses it and it is hard to contradict your peers. As the mildest of drugs, it is sugar’s feature that its effects are usually not enough to make someone quit, which is why it is so dangerous.

Biologically speaking, sugar attacks its user on many fronts. When you eat something sweet, you are instantly rewarded, meaning that your reward center is activated as soon as it touches your mouth. This is in contrast to other drugs which may take from a few seconds to an hour to kick in, because they need to enter the bloodstream in order to reach their target receptors. Sugar is instant, because your digestive tract is wired to detect monosaccharides. There are receptors for them in the mouth and even the esophagus. That is because glucose is the most basic compound for fueling cellular respiration: its existence is a universal indicator for food. So evolutionarily speaking, before agriculture, a human being was accustomed to far less sweetness in its food, which was an indicator of edibility. When we purify and consume sugar, we are actually hijacking this biological mechanism which developed to ensure our survival. We do this because we are spoiled monkeys seeking instant gratification.

Another biological effect of refined sugar is that it disrupts the carbohydrate metabolism. Introducing unusually large amounts of simple sugars to your digestive tract, with the lack of absorption dampeners such as fiber, causes a spike in your blood sugar, which the body has to account for by releasing insulin. Doing this daily causes insulin resistance, which is a state where insulin has no effect and you have perpetual high blood sugar. Feeling foggy and unable to focus, you resort to substances that stimulate you, such as caffeine or even more sugar. This results in a feedback loop of addiction which is very hard to break. The actual process has been outlined by molecular biologists and you can learn more about it in this presentation by Dr. Robert Lustig, who is a pediatric endocrinologist famous for increasing awareness on sugar.

Yet another biological effect which came to be known in the last 10 years is that a large concentration of simple sugars in your digestive tract negatively affects the composition of your gut biome. Your gut is home to many species of bacteria, yeast and other microorganisms. You have kilograms of them in and around your body, and it is okay 99% of the time. You are in a symbiotic relationship with them, meaning you need them as much as they need you. Having a healthy microbiome has many positive effects such as a strong immune system, whereas having an unhealthy one can trigger undesirable conditions ranging from gastric distress to autoimmune diseases. Your microbiome has a delicate balance which can easily be disturbed by sugar, a.k.a. the stuff that is used to grow bacteria. When you eat sugar, one species of microbe overpopulates and replaces others that benefit you. This can cause illnesses that are hard to foresee, because diagnosing is hard when you have interactions between thousands of species of microbes.

To summarize, sugar is a very sophisticated addictor and attacks its user on many fronts:

The reward-center, similar to hard-drugs. The carbohydrate metabolism, where it creates a feedback loop of sluggishness. The gut, where it disturbs the balance of microbes and causes many bad things.

Sugar is the gateway drug, not weed

Before the processed food industry, confectionery items were rare and reserved for special occasions. Since they were rare, people were instinctively aware that such items were special and not made for daily consumption. That is why we serve cake in birthdays and weddings. Desserts were also a separate and optional unit of meals. It is not optional anymore, since sugar can be in everything you eat. The processed food industry has robbed us of this choice. Our nutritional environment has become tainted.

Now, our whole culture is shaped around sugar. The dependence starts at an early age, when a child is fed something sugary for the first time, such as cake in a birthday party. The child becomes ecstatic, fireworks explode in his nervous system. He does not understand what has happened to him, since he has never been high before. He does not even register this as an abnormality; to him, this is just how things are supposed to be. He has been taught a very dangerous lesson: happiness can be obtained by external substances.

Do we really need studies to show us that an affinity towards sugar at an early age is correlated with substance abuse later in life? It should follow by pure logic. Indulgent behavior during childhood later manifests itself as addictions to tobacco, alcohol and marijuana, depending on the availability of each. As such, sugar is the quintessential gateway drug.

Food companies use math to increase addiction

In a western society, not everyone drinks coffee, but almost everyone consumes sweets except for the ones that are consciously avoiding it. It is precisely for this reason that sugar has become an instrument of revenue for the processed food companies: they use its addictive nature to exploit consumers and get away with it due to the lack of regulation.

By exploitation, do not just think of a blind increase in sugar. These companies pay researchers to run controlled experiments with thousands of trials. Then, they use multivariate optimization to find the most addictive concoctions. So the next time you think you can handle a little bit sugar in your soda, remember that you are trying to compete with science and your addiction is ensured by math itself.

Of course these methods reach beyond sugar, to every ingredient you can think of. If your goal is to quit processed food altogether, I recommend reading Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Micheal Moss. It is a long read, but it was the best eye-opener I have read in terms of food awareness.

It is not about health

If it were about health, going sugar free would have been called “normal eating”, not “healthy eating”. Because nobody would knowingly harm themselves, right?

It is a result of our neurology that individually, we are helpless against psychoactive substances. Because the organ being affected by the substance is also the one that is supposed to make the decision of quitting. Instead of thinking of this as a flaw of human nature, one should think of it as a feature of all living organisms, because all organic systems have weaknesses, and humans are no exception. Humans are ingenious in the way that they not only seek out rewarding substances like all other animals, but they can also purify, analyze and create their own. So the risk of addiction multiplies. Our inventiveness becomes our own demise.

This is what makes the self-destructive behavior with sugar possible. Even if a person is not willing to break out of the reward cycle, they can still decrease consumption or quit temporarily. They bear the effects of withdrawal for the sake of a better self-image, a thinner waistline. But since they are not psychologically prepared for a reward-free life, they relapse at the first sign of improvement or depression. It is not a matter of weight or health, but principle.

Sugar is ground-zero for indulgent behavior, so being okay with sugar is being okay with the possibility of self-destruction. “How much harm can come from a little dessert after every meal?”, you might ask. The answer is a lot, since the problem is not the sugar; the problem is you not having the strength to say no. When you introduce the high of a powerful stimulant to your life, you also introduce the low of its absence. This destabilizes your nervous system, chips away at the resilience you need in the face of trouble, and poisons your entire spectrum of feelings. Your whole perception gets bent around sugar.

The solution is to make the conscious decision of abandoning reward seeking behavior. You need to repeat to yourself:

Mantra I don’t need the reward that comes from sugar, and I have the power to live the rest of my life without it. I am okay with the pain of adjusting to a sugar-free life, because I know that I will be more focused, balanced and stronger afterwards.

If you think that kind of self-discipline is an overkill and akin to being ascetic, remember that there are countries where the sugar consumption is very little, that have never experienced an epidemic of the metabolic syndrome. If they can get along fine without sugar, so can you. If you feel like you feel subjected to peer pressure for your decisions, think of yourself as a citizen of those countries. I am from Turkey, and our cuisine has quite a lot of sweets. We are a very indulgent people when it comes to food. So I had to resist a lot of pressure from my parents’ generation, because I was contradicting their way of life. I was eventually able to make them accept my decision. You have to choose your own stance, and adapt it to your own condition. Always be one step further than your peers, and craft your responses beforehand.

Don’t fool yourself by avoiding only the obvious sweets, such as desserts and soda. If you are serious on the psychological option, you need to abandon the sensation of sweetness altogether. And you actually have a very efficient test to know whether something has sugar in it:

Sugar Test: Does it make you feel good instantly? If yes, the probability of it having sugar is a 100 percent.

Mildly sweet fruits are okay, but if you go hard on them, you will be fooling yourself. If you quit soda and instead start drinking the generic syrupy Chai-tea latte, you will be fooling yourself. If you quit oreos and instead start eating a lot of chocolate musli, you will be fooling yourself. I have been using the test for 2 years, and can assure you that it is foolproof. It helped me blacklist products that are seemingly innocent but actually contain lots of sugar.

Sugar is a very complex substance that causes a very complex reaction. Understanding how it affects your life takes time. Take your time, consider your diet, and don’t make rash decisions. This way, when the time comes, you will be more prepared, and your decisions will hold better. Doing research helps a lot; this article is the result of my own. Do your own research:

Learn about the reward center.

Learn about the sugar metabolism.

Learn about addiction psychology.

Learn about the processed food industry.

This way, you can increase your chances of success. Good luck.