You
may neither smoke marijuana, inhale cocaine, drink alcohol nor smoke a cigarette,
yet you should consider verifying how much sugary food you have had lately. Why
such peculiar analogy, you may wonder; have you ever felt a frenetic desire for
gorging yourself with sweets? You may either like sweets a lot or... SURPRISE!
You are an addict!
Believing
this can be hard as a candy; however, for Robert H. Lustig, Laura A. Schmidt and
Claire D. Brindis, researchers from the University of California, this
situation is a rather bittersweet issue: This addiction, known as “sweet tooth,”
can produce psychological illness such as anxiety syndrome and exaggerated
dependence as in drug addicts or alcoholic people.
This
phenomenon is related to the effects in certain brain receptors—a clear example
of this is chocolate; this incredibly familiar candy is also a sort of narcotic
bomb: giving it a bite will make your brain produce a hormone—neurotransmitter—named
serotonin, which increases the feeling of bliss. Therefore, this becomes an
extremely pleasant experience that somehow makes us evade reality.
Hence,
diseases such as diabetes and obesity are not the only issues that we should
concern about at the moment of eating our appetising candies; we need to take
into account the possibility of an inflated obsession that would make these ailments
even more likely to happen. Do you feel like having a whole bag of Frugelé’s right now?
