JJ Virgin, CNS Celebrity Nutrition & Fitness Expert, author The Virgin Diet and the new Sugar Impact Diet was interviewed on the Anxiety Summit by host of the Anxiety Summit, Trudy Scott, Food Mood Expert and Nutritionist, author of The Antianxiety Food Solution.
“The Sugar Impact Diet” and stress/anxiety
– The role stress and anxiety play in sugar addiction
– Why sugar is a drug and what it’s doing to our health and mood
– Why all sugar is not created equal and where it hides
– Why fructose is worse than glucose
– Can we eat natural sugars, fruit, honey and agave
– The dangers of artificial sweeteners
– Signs of high sugar impact and how the sugar impact diet works
– Why snacking may not be a good thing
Here is a snippet from our interview:
When you look at it, sugar is as addictive as cocaine. It’s more addictive than morphine. Connecticut College did a study where they looked at morphine and Oreos with rats and they both lit up the same pleasure centers/reward centers in the brain. The only difference was when the rats were given a choice between morphine and Oreos; they picked the Oreos because they were more pleasurable. Maybe it’s because with the Oreos you got a little trifecta because when you look at it what’s the worst thing? So sugar lights up the reward center and then you’ve got gluten and dairy, opiates, you know, caseomorphins and gluteomorphins and so just an opiate load to you when you look at something like cereal and milk, right, with all the sugar, gluten and dairy. So clearly you’ve got a drug and the more of it you eat the more of it you want.
stress and anxiety make you crave more sugar, you’re hungrier overall and then tired so you want things that are quick, energetic pick-me-ups and have unstable blood sugar. It’s like this trifecta of bad for setting you up for going after sugar
Here is one of the sugar-is-like-a-drug studies from 2013 – Sugar addiction: pushing the drug-sugar analogy to the limit.
research has revealed that sugar and sweet reward can not only substitute to addictive drugs, like cocaine, but can even be more rewarding and attractive.
The biological robustness in the neural substrates of sugar and sweet reward may be sufficient to explain why many people can have difficultly to control the consumption of foods high in sugar when continuously exposed to them.
And the rat oreo study/faculty research concluded with this:
Even though we associate significant health hazards in taking drugs like cocaine and morphine, high-fat/ high-sugar foods may present even more of a danger because of their accessibility and affordability
JJ’s new book Sugar Impact Diet launches November 4th – be sure to grab your copy to learn how you can lower your sugar impact today!
If you are not already registered for the Anxiety Summit you can get live access to the speakers of the day here www.theAnxietySummit.com