New studies suggest that we can get hooked on sugar just like drugs or alcohol. Is it solid science or scare-'em-straight hyperbole?
In the summer of 2014, registered dietitian Carole Bartolotto asked 20 of her colleagues at California-based managed-care giant Kaiser Permanente to do the unthinkable: cut out all added sugars and artificial sweeteners for two weeks. To rally her coworkers, she used the motivation tactic du jour and called it a "challenge." The instructions: No added sweeteners of any kind (including honey, stevia, Splenda). No processed foods exceeding five grams of added sugar per serving. And no more than five servings of fresh fruit daily—no fruit juice.
The results surprised Bartolotto. After two weeks, 95 percent of participants reported that sugary foods and drinks tasted sweeter or too sweet. And 75 percent said that foods such as baby carrots, even crackers, tasted sweet. "It only took two weeks for people to completely reset their palates," she says.
The first part of the experiment wasn't pretty, however. More than half the group described intense, uncomfortable sugar cravings that only subsided after three days. For another third, it took six days. Participants suffered headaches, reported that the diet modification required a "great deal of willpower," and called the first days "brutal."
Many of us have observed that sugar begets sugar. Think of the holidays, when after days of bingeing on cookies, pie, and the neighbor's homemade peppermint bark, you wake up the next morning with a great idea: gingerbread Bundt cake for breakfast!
But Bartolotto's small survey, published in the peer-reviewed Permanente Journal, is fascinating because it's one of the few to document that we go through an actual withdrawal process when we stop eating sugar. It also confirms the informal stories shared over the years by sugar detoxers: that eliminating sugar causes low energy, depression, flulike symptoms, and mental fogginess, at least temporarily.
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