Episode 248: The Neuroscience Behind Sugar Addiction
with Dr. Nicole Avena
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we welcome an expert in prenatal and childhood nutrition, Dr. Nicole Avena. She will teach us ways to recognize and reduce sugar in our diets. She’ll offer research on the addictive properties of sugar. She’ll also articulate the importance of eating well during pregnancy, followed by what we can do to start our babies and children off with healthy diets. Sugar is addictive and we as a society certainly eat too much of it. Dr. Nicole is here to help us discover ways to reduce sugar intake. She’ll tell us how to eat healthy as a family despite exposure to sugary foods early in life.
Let me tell you just a bit more about our guest. Dr. Nicole Avena is research neuroscientist and expert in the fields of nutrition, diet, and addiction. Dr. Avena has written the books, Why Diets Fail, What to Eat When You’re Pregnant, and What to Feed Your Baby and Toddler. Dr. Avena is a sought-after speaker and she regularly appears on the Dr. Oz show. She has also been a guest on several radio programs and podcasts and has been filmed for several documentaries on the obesity epidemic. She has the TED-Ed talk, How Sugar Affects Your Brain as well as a blog on Psychology Today called, “Food Junky.”
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Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Nicole Avena, welcome to Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Avena:
Thank you, happy to be here.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, it’s great. We actually had you on Health Hunters Radio, our radio show. I loved the topic, so I wanted to have you here as well. When we look at addictions today, come on, there’s so many. I think most people are familiar with of course drug addiction, alcohol addiction. They understand the severity of it, but sugar addition. This is your expertise. You’ve written three books really dealing with this subject even from what to eat during your pregnancy because what you eat during your pregnancy has a lot to do with addictions in the child later. Then even what to feed your babies and toddlers, that was your other book because, again, that leads to addiction. Then obviously, breaking addiction. Was that your first book was breaking addiction?
Dr. Avena:
It’s called, Why Diets Fail.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, Why Diets Fail; yeah, Why Diets Fail. All those books, folks, you can find on Amazon I’m sure. After interviewing her, I can tell you; you might want to pick some of those up because sugar addiction; let’s get into it. Look, I think I said it. Everyone’s familiar with alcohol, drug addiction, but I don’t know; more people are probably sugar addicts than anything. It’s a real problem and it’s a problem in the brain. Would you agree with that?
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, I think you’re right though that people generally recognize that drugs like alcohol, and morphine, and cocaine, they’re addictive. They can be addictive. People avoid them because they’re afraid of getting addicted to them in some cases, but I don’t think the general public has really gotten on board with the idea that sugar can be addictive. I think a lot of people experience sugar addiction, but when you look at our modern food environment, there’s just sugar in so many of the things that we eat. It’s generally recognized as a safe substance. It’s an ingredient in most of the grocery store items; at least pre-packaged one that you can find when you go grocery shopping. I think that there’s a lot of research that’s now been supporting this idea that this could be a real thing. This is a real problem. Like you were saying, a lot of that comes from the studies that show how it affects the brain. In many ways, it’s much like what happens with a drug.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, look, you have a background in psychology. You have a background obviously in neuroscience. Obviously, you get what’s going on here and here. I believe this is a combination of both. With the background that you have, you have extensive study. How did you get into this one niche?
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, great question. It just happened. I was doing my Ph.D. at Princeton University. I was working with my advisor trying to come up with what project I was going to do for my dissertation work. We started talking about different ideas. I had been interested in behavior and motivated behaviors, why people do and don’t do things. Obesity had come up as something that was particularly interesting because we were starting to see this rise in obesity epidemic. There was a lot of media attention being given to that. It was curious to me because we have all these diet programs, all this advice, all this information out there to help us to eat healthy, but people just can’t do it. People have such a hard time giving up the sweets, giving up the junk food essentially.
We started thinking about, well, maybe it’s like a drug. Maybe some of the foods that people tend to eat like ice cream for instance, there’s no ice cream tree; it’s not a natural thing. It’s a concoction of a bunch of different ingredients and sugars that are designed to make us like it and make us eat it. What if some of these designer foods are more like drugs than anything? We started off doing a series of experiments to try to understand whether or not sugar could be addictive. Almost 15 years later, I’m still doing the same studies. We’re still trying to learn more and more about this.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we know that drugs or any addiction stimulates dopamine. Even pulling a slot machine lever, you get a dopamine spike, and literally, there you go. You just want that quick fix. Look, I’ve read recent articles that people that just—it’s an email, it’s a text, it’s Facebook; they’re saying its dopamine spikes. Once you just go back, then all of a sudden, you’re addicted. How is sugar doing that? Explain the difference with drugs, what I just described in sugar. Is it all doing the same thing in the brain?
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, it has to do with the degree to which it’s doing it. You’re right that pulling on a slot machine handle, or pressing a button, or whatever they have on those machines anymore, or using drugs, doing all these activities, even healthy things like running for instance, they’re reward reinforcing. That can release dopamine in reward-related brain regions. Smoking also releases dopamine. One of the things that’s unique about food and about many of these other behaviors that we don’t always get addicted to is that the dopamine release tends to habituate over time. If you were to eat a new food that you’ve never tasted before, of course, your dopamine is going to rise when you taste it because it’s more associated with the novelty of the food than anything.
Once your body has coded a steak, meaning you didn’t get sick from it, your brain doesn’t release dopamine every time you eat food. It only really releases it when the food is new. Drugs of abuse are different though because every time you use a drug of abuse like alcohol, or cocaine, or morphine, or nicotine, that releases dopamine in the reward-related brain regions. That’s the big difference between foods and drugs. What our studies have shown and what others have confirmed is that when you overeat sugar, it releases dopamine in a way that looks more like a drug than food.
Dr. Pompa:
Got it.
Dr. Avena:
It’s not like just the first time you have sugar it’s releasing dopamine; when you’re overusing sugar or over-consuming it in excess, it can release dopamine repeatedly. That’s where this whole addiction cascade comes into play because that release of dopamine causes a whole series of events to occur that change the receptors, change the gene expression. All these other pathways are all connected in the brain. That’s really where it begins.
Dr. Pompa:
You can tell me if I’m wrong. With alcoholism or drugs, we’ve discovered I think that there is a genetic component of some people are way more predisposed to this. Is it the same with sugar? There’s some people just like, hey, if they do too much sugar, they’re going to be hooked, and some people not?
Dr. Avena:
That’s a great question. There is some evidence that there’s a genetic predisposition toward food addiction. It actually turns out to be there’s same different alleles of the genes that are also associated with a predisposition to use drugs or to use alcohol. There’s certainly overlaps between the two. There’s also some really interesting research that’s looked at the overlap between alcohol use and sugar use and the hereditary component of that. There’s some data that suggests that having a mother or a father who might have been an alcoholic or had a problem with alcohol predisposes some people to them maybe become addicted to sugar or to have issues overeating sugar; and vice versa, people who are diagnosed as being alcoholics, there’s data that suggests that when they go back and retrospectively think about what their parents were like when they were younger, there’s often the case that the parents, one or more of the parents was identified as being someone with a sweet tooth or really liking sugar.
There’s certainly an overlap between the two, but I think it’s not just genetics because our entire -inaudible- is a big part of it. Our food environment is really I think the thing that we have a hard time changing. We can’t change our genetics obviously, but we can fight against them with our behavior. Our food environment’s a lot different because you might want to cut back on sugar, but if you don’t even know where your sugars coming from, you don’t know that the sugars in maybe a coffee creamer that you use when you’re at the coffee shop, then how are you going to cut it out of your diet, or how are you going to reduce it? It’s in so many places; it’s hidden in really so many places.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, right. The alcoholic, they just don’t go to the bar, and hey, no alcohol, but it’s not hidden in every food like sugar which makes this obviously more difficult. You referred to the gene, I agree. Epigenetics is what we realized is most of this. Meaning, you have a gene of susceptibility and it gets triggered. Part of what you talk about, and one of the reasons you wrote the books on what to eat during your pregnancy, and even what to feed your baby and toddler later is because you state that a lot of the addiction happens then in utero. Is that epigenetic? Does mom trigger the gene in the baby or is it simply physiological?
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, I think it’s a combination of both. I got interested in the genesis of sugar addiction. For many years, they were studying and trying to establish whether or not sugar addiction was a real thing, whether it was something we could experimentally see in the lab. That has been continuing to grow and that literature I think has been pretty well established now. It became more apparent to me that we need to try to understand, well, where does this start? It’s one thing to know that people are addicted to sugar, but then we’re left treating them. How do we prevent it from happening in the first place?
We’ve been doing a lot of research looking at the effect of diet during pregnancy. There’s this literature that suggests that the first 1,000 days of life, the time period from conception through Age Two is really a critical window for nutritional intervention; meaning that food preferences can be entrained early in that space. It has an effect on immune response later in life. Exposures to various different things during that critical window can have long-term health outcomes. I got interested in looking at the effects of overeating sugar during pregnancy and how that might affect the offspring. We’ve done several studies that look at this and found that when—in our laboratory animal studies, when the mother is exposed to sugar, excessive amounts of sugar, it actually produces change in the babies where they’re overweight when they get older, they have a preference for a high-fat diet, and they’re also having increased triglyceride levels, which is really interesting when you think about because they’ve never even had sugar in their life; they just were simply exposed to it in the womb.
Clearly, there’s a lot that goes on developmentally. There’s so much sensitivity during those critical windows, especially during pregnancy. We don’t really pay much attention to diet during pregnancy. A lot of the advice that women are given, and I can speak from personal experience having had two babies of my own, it’s just all about body weight. Don’t eat this. Don’t eat fish because it has mercury in it. Don’t eat hot dogs. It’s all about not gaining too much weight and avoiding toxins, but there’s really not a lot of support or guidance for women about which foods are going to promote a healthy pregnancy, why you should maybe cut back on carbohydrates and processed sugars, especially if you’re having cravings a lot. That’s what inspired me to write, What to Eat When You’re Pregnant.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and I think if women knew that, hold on, eating sugar during my pregnancy could cause this later in my child? I think that they would really say, well, what do I eat then? That was what the basis of your book was. I want to talk a little bit about that.
It’s interesting because I think about the Duke University study that they took identical twin mice. They exposed one to a toxin: this group to a toxin, this group not. They had the same DNA. This group became obese. The next generation and next generation became obese eating the exact same diet as the group over here that remained skinny. Meaning, they triggered a gene into the next generation.
Sugar obviously from what your study is showing does the same thing. Later in life, they become obese. Later in life, they become high triglycerides. It affects their blood chemistry. We’re seeing that sugar, in fact, is doing the exact same thing. Let’s talk about what women eat because this is a big deal; we could change generations. I think the advice is, okay, eat more fruits and vegetables, but nobody does it. Is that the advice or is it more than that?
Dr. Avena:
I think that especially during pregnancy it’s really more about having a healthy diet that has a lot of variety in it so that you’re able to get all the essential macronutrients that you need but also the micronutrients. Especially in the first trimester, it can be tough to do that if people are nauseous or just not feeling well. It can be hard to eat things that are good for us like eggs for instance which contain lots of things that are going to be beneficial especially for brain development. I think that it boils down to helping women during pregnancy and helping new parents too when they begin feeding their baby to really just understand what are some ideas? What are some healthy things that I can eat at given points?
Because you’ve got to keep in mind during the nine months of pregnancy, the nutritional needs are not the same on Day One as they are on the last day before you give birth? There’s lots of differences in term of what micronutrients are needed. I think that kind of information can be helpful. It can also be helpful for women to just understand that it’s not a period of life where, oh, you’re gaining weight, so you might as well just give in and eat whatever you want, which is the -inaudible- many people have. It’s really about what these foods and exposures to these foods can do to the baby long-term. I think that’s what not a lot of people are aware of. That’s what I’m hoping to bring more visibility to.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, in your book—we don’t have to get into it because your book has—it has what to eat when because your point is well taken. There’s certain demands and needs for different foods at different times where I would say people are going to fail because they don’t have a plan. You offer a plan. Meaning that, look, they have all—mothers have good intentions until—I think it was Mike Tyson said everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. It’s like everybody has a plan until they show up to work without food. That would be the analogy I’d make. Do you give them a plan?
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, in What to Eat When You’re Pregnant, I do give a plan that really breaks the pregnancy down week by week. What happens is each week, there is a different food of the week that is rich in certain nutrients that are good to be getting that given week. For instance, early in the pregnancy, the food of the week in one of the weeks in the first trimester would be like spinach because spinach is really high in folic acid. I talk a lot about ways in which you can get more spinach in your diet; it doesn’t have to be sautéed spinach. You can throw in a little bit of a salad. I also include some recipes. It’s really just about giving people ideas so that they understand what nutrients are important to be getting at specific time points so that then they can implement them. Then also so that they can be prepared.
If you have ideas on what food you should be eating, then when you go grocery shopping, you can load up on those, and then prepare food, so you don’t have to get into a situation where you’re making an unhealthy food choice because you didn’t have a snack. My advice is to really always be prepared, always have something to eat on you especially if you’re pregnant because you never know when you’re going to suddenly just feel like, you know what, I’m hungry. I think pregnancy is the time when people go from zero to hungry in two seconds flat. It has to do with hormonal fluctuations. It has to just do with the taxing that the baby’s taking on our bodies. It can lead to poor food choices if you’re not prepared, so having a bunch of healthy snakes on hand at all times is really critical.
Dr. Pompa:
When you make decisions in emotion. When you’re hungry like that, it’s emotion; they’re always bad decisions.
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, it’s never good.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s never good. It’s like when you make decisions when you’re not hungry, you’re going to make them from a point of logic like, oh, I need to eat good; I’m pregnant.
Dr. Avena:
Exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s move into the babies and the toddlers. Babies, nursing, that’s the number one. Then we start to introduce foods. Then we want to introduce foods because your point is so well taken. You see kids that ate well as children even if they as teenagers go back—or go out in the world. All of my kids came back. They all went out as teenagers and started eating things and then they came back to the diet that they grew up on. There’s proof right there and I have five kids. We’ll talk about my youngest one in a minute. Yeah, talk about that, the importance of feeding the kids right.
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, I wrote a follow-up book to What to Eat When You’re Pregnant that actually just came out about a month ago. It’s called, What to Feed Your Baby and Toddler because this is really the next step as we talk about the importance of good nutrition during pregnancy. We know from that research that the window is really the first 1,000 days. That goes through Age Two. There’s a lot of questions about what you should feed a baby and when. There’s lots of conflicting advice. There’s lots of different arguments out there depending on who you ask. Some people advocate you could start a baby at four months on solids. Most people, I fall into this camp as well, will suggest waiting until six months.
It really comes down to helping parents to understand the importance of basically training the baby to like healthy foods because you can do it. It’s just that people are usually quick to rush to try a whole bunch of different foods because they’re excited that the baby’s eating. They want to let them have exposure to all these different things. If you can get the baby eating lots of vegetables early on, it can really help because then they’re going to develop a taste preference for vegetables. They’re not going to bulk at them in a couple of months when they’re deciding that they do or do not want to eat something.
Dr. Pompa:
The brain is developing those things; that’s why it happens. The brain is literally developing. As you’re giving them those flavors, the brain is liking them.
Dr. Avena:
Right, and the brain’s encoding that they’re safe and that they’re nutritious. Part of the problem that we face in the baby food world is that if you look at the commercially available baby foods, a lot of them are blends. A lot of them are things that contain a lot of fruit. It’s often the case that the fruit is masking the taste of any vegetable that’s in the food. My favorite example is around Thanksgiving time, a lot of the companies who manufacture baby food will put out a turkey dinner. It’s supposed to be the equivalent of our turkey dinner and our Thanksgiving dinner. It is promoted to be a turkey—it’s going to have turkey in it. It’s going to have maybe some cranberries, a little bit of apples, and vegetables, but when you look at the actual ingredients and the amounts that’s in there, there’s hardly any turkey. It’s mostly apples. That happens with a lot of different blends.
What happens is I think we start our babies off liking sweet. They naturally are going to like sweet. They’re born liking sweet; it’s innate. They’re going to like it no matter what. What happens is of course if they taste something sweet like an apple, then, of course, the peas aren’t going to taste that good because they don’t -inaudible- those apples. I think that many parents fall into this trap of wanting to please the baby and make them happy. They end up giving them too much fruit in my opinion. I advise that people try to stick to giving vegetables by themselves without the fruits blended in. If anything, chase it at the end with a little bit of fruit as like the desert.
Dr. Pompa:
I could not agree more. Let’s take it one step worse; fruit juice, oh, that satisfies them. Then there they are; it’s basically a cup of sugar, but because it’s 100% orange juice, moms think it’s okay, or dads -inaudible-. The fact is its just pure sugar.
Dr. Avena:
Right, The American Academy of Pediatrics I guess about a year or so ago came out with guidelines stating that there is no place for fruit juice in a child under the age of one. I think there’s no place for a fruit juice in any child or adult for that matter. Yeah, when you give your kids fruit juice, it really is just sugar water. You’re sucking all the fiber, all the nutrients out of the fruit, and you’re just giving them the sugar. I often suggest to people if you really want your kid to have a fruit juice type of beverage, blend up a whole fruit. Make a smoothie for them, so that at least they’re still going to get the fiber. They’re going to get the other nutrients that’s in the fruits. It’s not going to be just this bolus of sugar because that’s essentially what your kid’s going to have in fruit juice.
Dr. Pompa:
Look, yeah, we’re starting into the solution of the problem. You can see it starts in utero. Then it starts what we’re feeding our children. Obviously, the more vegetables mom eats, the more vegetables the baby’s going to like. As children, the more vegetables we give them, the more they’ll like later. We’re beating this sugar addiction here.
Alright, let’s step back because we’ve created a world full of addicts at this point, some worse than others; let’s face it. We already talked that could be genetic. What do we do? We talked about the alcoholic. We can just say, hey, just stay away from the alcohol, but as we mentioned, sugar’s in everything. What do we do about this? Do we cold turkey? Do we wean them down? What have you found in your studies to be the best?
Dr. Avena:
Much like with drug—treatment for drug addictions, it’s not always going to be that one approach is going to work for everybody. I think that there has to be multiple ways to treat this. When people try one thing, if it doesn’t work, they might have to move onto the next. Some people advocate a cold turkey approach just like you would use with drugs or alcohol. I personally think that is very difficult to do in our modern food environment because we’re constantly bombarded with food, with sugar. It’s everywhere.
The advertisements for it are everywhere. That’s not the case for drugs and alcohol. You don’t ever really see advertisements for alcohol. You never see billboards with drug paraphernalia on them or anything like that. People who have drug and alcohol problems are constantly having to fight off these urges from the visual cues in our environment; whereas people trying to cut back on sugar are—you walk down the street, and you get hit with hundreds of images of food, and smells, and things like that.
I suggest that if cold turkey isn’t going to work, then more of like harm reduction approach is better. A harm reduction approach really is exactly what it says; it’s reducing the harm that the substance is causing you. It’s getting to the point where you’re back in control of how much of the substance you consume. When it comes to something like sugar, I think it really comes down to taking baby steps. I know this goes in the face of what everybody wants because people want to just be off the sugar, have it done and out of my life, but if you want something that’s sustainable, it’s going to have to be something that grows slowly. I often suggest that people start off by picking the one thing that’s the worst for them, that’s causing them the most harm when it comes to sugar. That happens to be sugar-sweetened beverages. If you’re -inaudible- drinker, it ties addiction to soda; same with the fruit juice.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. In your books, that’s step one. Get rid of all these sugar drinks, which by the way, there’s multiple reasons for that. These drinks as we pointed out, they’re the biggest culprits. They’re the thing driving the diabetes epidemic and the obesity epidemic. Again, it’s the ones you even think healthy that say 100% orange juice. Then you have your vitamin drinks. Then you have your Red Bulls. It gets higher and higher with the levels of sugar, caffeine. Then the chemicals that are addictive in the brain. Now, you have a chemical, the sugar, the most addictive things. All the kids are drinking them, so how do you get rid of them?
Dr. Avena:
I think that you made some really good points about the liquid beverages being the culprit; and they are. In my book, Why Diets Fail, which is a book that is really all about the science of sugar addiction, all about what the research is telling us, and then ways in which you can reduce sugar in your diet, and to recognize all the different places that it is. That’s also a part of the problem is people don’t know what to look for because when you turn a label over it doesn’t just say sugar; it says brown cane syrup, or it will say agave. It will say all other things. There’s like 50 different terms that are used that are under that umbrella of sugar.
I think the thing about the sugar-sweetened beverages is that they’re basically -inaudible- all the things that you never get full from. Nobody ever says, oh, I just had a can of soda; I’m full, even though it could be 200 calories or 300 calories. We should feel some satiety from that amount of calories, but we don’t. The liquid calories just do not affect our satiety system in the same way that solid calories do from food. That’s why it’s so easy to consume a gallon of soda a day because you really just never get full off of it. That’s I think a big factor that contributes to why people become overweight.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and it leads—it actually does the opposite; it actually leads to more hunger. Then it’s so high in sugar, it blunts your insulin receptors, your leptin receptors. Then it screws up your feedback that shuts your brain off permanently, so now you have issues with that. Alright, what’s step two? After, okay, we get rid of the sugary drinks, step two.
Dr. Avena:
Right, sugary drinks. Don’t forget the sugary drinks also includes fruit juice and also coffee drinks. That’s a big one that people don’t realize.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it is. The additives in coffee is the killer.
Dr. Avena:
Creamer, and even like soy milk, or almond milk. Those types of things.
Dr. Pompa:
Listen, if you go to a Starbucks, and you see what’s in those lattes that the world is drinking, it is a nightmare. It is a disaster. I’ve looked at the ingredients and the sugar is through the roof. That’s why it’s all part of the addition. You have the caffeine that’s addictive, the sugar, and the chemicals. It’s ridiculous. Cut that out.
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, and a lot of those coffee drinks, they’re—let’s face it, they’re deserts. They’re not coffee; it’s a desert. If it has whip cream on top of it, it’s a desert no matter what you say.
Dr. Pompa:
No problem with regular coffee.
Dr. Avena:
For the second step after you’ve gotten rid of all the sugar-sweetened beverages, and the beverages that are high in sugar in your diet, then it comes to identifying what are the trigger foods. What are the foods that you tend to overeat or the foods that you go to that you feel like you don’t have control of? I don’t think people need to empty out their pantries and get rid of everything; I think you have to keep the foods one at a time. For instance, if you’re a cookie person and it happens to be cookies, you have to really sit down and evaluate. Okay, well, what is it about these cookies that I like? Is it that they’re chewy? Is there something about them? Could I bake cookies or make them in a way that’s healthier that’s not going to contain so much sugar.
You really have to understand what it is you like about the food, so that you can replace it with something healthier. It’s not about depriving yourself; it’s about replacing it with a non-sugar alternative. That’s really the next step. That step can last a while because you really need to then go through each of the foods that are high in sugar that you’re coping with and come with alternative foods that can satisfy that. In my book, I have lots of examples about the typical foods that people tend to overeat that have lots of sugar in them. Then safer foods that aren’t going to contain as much added sugar if any at all.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I think that’s a great idea. That’s a great step. I think the other thing too that we talked about is preparation, being prepared. If you end up at work or at the church meeting without one of these things that you switch with, you could be in trouble real fast. My advice would be, be prepared. I’m sure you discuss that.
Dr. Avena:
I do; I think preparation is really key. The reality is we’re busy people. Everyone’s got a lot going on. We tend to put our food on the side in the sense that we know that you can always pop into a store and grab something to eat. You know that there’s convenience stores everywhere you go. It’s not as much a priority for people because they know they can get food and it can be pretty cheap to get it if they need to get it. I think a lot of people really rely on the convenience factor a little bit too much and it causes us to sometimes make poor food choices. I think it’s really important to come up with a plan of snacks or food items that you can have with you if you’re on the run or if you’re taking your kids places and stuff like that. You can make sure you’re eating something that’s healthy and that you want to eat so you don’t have to make an impulse decision and eat something out of a convenience store that is going to be loaded with sugar.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I said my son, Simon. My five kids, the four older ones, we raised them the right way, the way you’re describing. As I said, they went off as teenagers. They all came back, and they all eat healthy now, all four of them. Now, Simon, he was—when we moved from Pittsburgh to here six years ago in Park City, Simon was raised well on a good diet, but we had a lot of stress in our life. We moved. We just took the hands-off, which you do with the last child anyway. You just say, they’ll figure it out; the other ones did.
Evidently, he was going riding his bike down to the convenience store at the end of the street. He got sugar addicted. We had one of the five who was sugar addicted. Of course, he became 30 pounds overweight, the whole thing. Of course, the other kids would be like, why do you let him get away with this? We couldn’t eat anything. We were just like, Simon, you’ve got to figure it out. Of course, he didn’t want to hear it.
Then he saw a picture of—I was doing a power point. She had severe eczema and psoriasis really. He saw the before and the after. He asked of course what she did. Of course, I said, she did these dietary changes, everything I teach, my cellular detox, and she fasted. He left the room and came back and said, “I’m going to fast.” Of course, I didn’t think he was going to. He made it the next day—or he made it through that day with which I was amazed. The next day, he did another day.
Bottom line is he went 11 days, okay, on a fast. It actually ended up fixing his addiction literally. After that, he started eating more vegetables. He started doing better and all the weight came off. That was a couple of years ago. To this day, he’s lean and mean. It really was the thing of him seeing the picture of the woman. That must be something that is a driver for this because if you just say, I want to lose weight, I’m going to get rid of the sugar, I don’t know if that’s enough. It seems like it takes the hard thing. Am I right on that?
Dr. Avena:
I think you’re right. I think part of the issue is that people don’t take their health seriously until there’s something wrong with their health. All it takes is a -inaudible- pull out because I think people generally tend to just assume that they’re well. Oh, maybe they’re a little bit overweight, but hey, you know what? Everybody’s a little bit overweight, so it’s not a big deal.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s it, yeah.
Dr. Avena:
That can be okay, but I think that what happens is because obesity is a chronic condition. Meaning, you’re not going to drop dead after—because you ate one cupcake, but over the course of many years, the long-term effects of overeating and carrying the extra body weight can increase your risk for diseases. It’s really like a chronic condition. It’s a slow killer essentially. That’s why it’s not something that I think really resonates with people until they have a problem, until something physically happens to them, until they get told, oh, you have diabetes. Oh, you have high blood pressure. Now, you need to be on a statin. It’s one of those things where they need to hear something happened before they take it seriously.
Dr. Pompa:
Even that, people get on the statin, and they think, hey, the drug fixes it; I’m fine. They get on the diabetic medication. There’s a time and a place for medication; however, they don’t realize that people that take the medication die at the same rate that the people who don’t. You look at the stats, it’s like, okay, because you didn’t get rid of the cause. I think it’s even a false protection even then.
Dr. Avena:
It is; and I think it’s always better if we can have food be our first line of defense in terms of preventing diseases, and use nutrition to our benefit, I think that’s really key. I’m hoping we’ll start to see it change in the way in which people think about their health, and especially the role of diet in our health. Because right now, I don’t think that there’s really much seriousness taken about how your diet can affect your health long-term. It’s certainly among little kids, we don’t see that happening as well. I have two little kids of my own, so I can speak from personal experience, too. The mindset is really about having fun. Health is not taken all that seriously and nutrition especially.
Dr. Pompa:
I some years ago marketed, it’s not your fault really talking a lot about what we’re talking about. Your book, your first book was called, Why Diets Fail. I think we answered the question, but simply put, why do diets fail?
Dr. Avena:
Diets fail because of the way we think about the term diet. Everybody wants to go on a diet and then go off the diet once they lose weight. That’s not how it’s going to work. Diets fail because people have this mindset that it’s a temporary thing. You’re going to do this for a few months or a year, and then you’re going to go back to eating your old ways. If you really want to make long-term changes in your health and your weight, the diet has to be the way you eat for the rest of your life. It’s not a quick fix. It’s not something you’re going to do temporarily. It has to be a big change.
The other reason why diets fail is because our diets are loaded with added sugars. With all this research that’s supporting this idea that they could be addictive, it’s really hard to beat something when it’s an addiction especially -inaudible-. We had have avoided it’s an addiction. Just like one of the first steps when someone becomes an alcoholic or wants to seek out treatment for an addiction to drugs, they have to admit that they have an addiction. That’s it. As a society, if we’re not admitting that sugar’s addictive, then how are we ever going to get off of it or reduce how much we’re consuming of it?
Dr. Pompa:
I think that’s the importance of your research, your books, and your work. What about the artificial sweeteners? I’ve read that some of them are more addictive even than sugar. Of course, they’re showing up in many of the foods.
Dr. Avena:
Right, artificial sweeteners are an interesting case because, in terms of the addiction, it has more to do with the sweet taste than it does the actual type of sweetener. Studies show that artificial sweeteners can still activate the dopamine system and that reward system in the brain much like what happens with regular sugar. You might save calories, but there’s also studies that suggest that you’re going to eat more calories later on if you consume something with artificial sweetener compared to a regular caloric sweetener. I think we’re starting to see a lot more artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols in our food supply. That’s because there’s new regulations in place that companies need to disclose the amount of added sugar in food products.
Artificial sweeteners aren’t added sugar. You can have artificial sweeteners in a box of cookies, and also have regular sugar, but they only have to report how much regular sugar they put in. They might want to make it taste extra sweet. They’re going to add some artificial sweeteners to do the job too because that way, they don’t have to say on the box that, oh, this is 200% of your daily recommended value of added sugar because no one wants to see that on the back of a menu label. I think that’s really something we’re going to start to hear more and more about as more companies are having to change their formulations of these different foods to address the fact that we’re going to have more artificial sweeteners in our diet just because of these new regulations.
Dr. Pompa:
Draw a distinction for our viewers and listeners because it’s very confusing when you look at a label as you pointed out. We can look at the total carbohydrates. Then there’s sugar. There’s fiber. There’s different parts that make up that total. That’s confusing. There’s a difference when you get natural sugar from a sweet potato versus as we were saying, just the straight sugar in the drink. Clarify some of that for people because I know people are confused on it. That’s what leads to the failure oftentimes.
Dr. Avena:
Right; when you’re looking at for instance, if you buy a really good applesauce let’s say. It doesn’t have added sugar in it. It’s just really pureed apples. You would look on there and you would see how many carbohydrates it contains. That number might be relatively high. Then you’d see that it contains let’s say nine grams of sugar. Now, that sugar is all coming naturally from the apples; it’s not added sugar. There’s a new regulation that now requires on the nutrition facts label—and you’ll probably see this on lots of products if you haven’t already. That line under sugars is added sugars. This is -inaudible- the added sugar.
When you’re looking at labels, that’s the one you want to pay careful attention to. Because you can have like I said, pureed apples, or something that has a sweet potato puree, something like that’s going to naturally be high in sugars and that might be fine. The added sugar is what you need to watch out for. You want to take a look at that and hopefully see that to be as low as possible. Like I said, keep in mind that the companies are cleaver. There’s going to be some changes. You’re going to start to see a lot more sugar alcohols added to these different products to make up for the sweetness that they can’t get by adding all that sugar in that they typically would.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, and an alcohol sugar might not raise blood sugar the same; however, to your point, the sweet still gives the addiction. Those who struggle with the sweet and the addiction, you’re not solving your addiction problem.
Dr. Avena:
Right, exactly. I think that’s the big point is that if you’re really looking to cut out sugar, then you have to cut out fake sugar, too. I think that people use it as a crutch. That’s fine in the beginning, but I think eventually the goal should be to try to just get rid of the excess amount of sweetener in your diet whether it’s Stevia, or a sugar alcohol, or something. It really is about reducing the amount of sweet that we’re exposed to because that’s what’s activating these brain systems and causing us to want to overeat it continually.
Dr. Pompa:
I guess the hope is—obviously, in your book, you describe this process of weaning down. It could be done? Because I think that’s the worry is like, okay, am I the alcoholic that can’t just ever have one drink and I’m doomed? With sugar, it works a little different than that. In fact, you can wean down and get your brain to not desire as much, correct?
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, that’s really the goal is to get to the point where you’re back in control where you feel like, I can have one or two cookies, and I’m not going to have to eat the whole bag. It might mean that for a couple of weeks or months, you don’t have any cookies. You’re eating something that’s a replacement for those cookies or for whatever the food it is that you’re trying to avoid. The goal is to get to a point where you can enjoy these things but in moderation. That takes a lot of self-monitoring because when—a lot of people will ask me, well, when will I be there? When can I have this again? I can’t answer that; it’s really about you, and about what’s happening in your physiology, and where you are, and where you feel that you can be in control. I think that is a very individual thing. It involves a lot of stepping back and taking a look at yourself, and saying, hey, if I go for this little piece of cake, am I going to be satisfied with that or am I going to feel like I need to have another and another? That’s when you have to ask yourself those tough questions and be able to give yourself those tough answers if necessary.
Dr. Pompa:
I think one of the things you’ve pointed is you can’t—your brain can’t ever feel like it’s deprived. If it feels deprived, you’re going to break. You’re going to break at the next emotional thing or whatever it is. That’s going to be a little bit different for everybody what makes you feel not deprived. You have to figure out what is going to make me not feel deprived because then it can be complete lifestyle. One of the things we talked when I interviewed you on the radio show, I talked about how we have my diet variation concept. We throw in one or two feast days a week. I was surprised that people said, that’s the thing that keeps me going that I can do this forever. I’m like, huh. Because again, these are—feast days, I’m telling them to eat healthy carbohydrates like sweet potatoes and different things. It becomes the treat for them. They’re like, I can do this forever. Is that a strategy?
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, I think so. It’s the whole idea of you have something to look forward to. You’re not sucking all the joy out of life. You know that, hey, I can indulge in the thing I want; I just got to wait a couple of days. It’s going to happen. I think that can be a strong motivator for people. I think that can work on many levels. I think the key though is just to make sure that you’re in control when you do have those feast days.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, because otherwise, you just keep going.
Dr. Avena:
Yeah, and that the feast day doesn’t turn into the feast weekend, or the feast week, or those types of things that might happen.
Dr. Pompa:
I think that’s the importance of making sure there’s still no refined added sugars in there because they’re going to be far more addictive than the sweet potato because the sweet potato has vitamins, fiber, etc, which is not going to be the same addiction.
Dr. Avena:
Right, exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s a good point though because you can replace some of that desire with really healthy—there’s a sweet component like you said. We’re innately driven to some sweet. Going towards the more fiber, healthy, vitamin-rich foods that have the sweet, it’s going to be far different than saying, you know what? I’m just going to eat the cake. If you’re an addict, don’t do that. You’re going to end up in great danger.
Dr. Avena:
There’s lots of things out there that—if you have a sweet tooth, you can crave them by eating a date. That’s super sweet. What happens when people get off the processed foods and stop eating so much of them, I’ve had so many people come to me and say, oh my goodness, I never realized how sweet strawberries could be or how sweet blueberries could be. Because they never experienced it because their tongues and their brains were so used to being bombarded with added sugar that they weren’t able to detect the sweetness in the natural things that have sugar. If you start to look at the information that’s out there, a lot of this I have in my book, Why Diets Fail, there’s a lot of foods that are out there that are naturally sweet that can satisfy your sweet craving. It doesn’t have to come from added sugar. It doesn’t have to come from highly processed foods. It really can come from nature.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely; well, Dr. Avena, do you have a website that people can get to?
Dr. Avena:
I do; yep, I do. It’s www.drnicoleavena.com. There’s links to all of our research papers on the site. There’s also links to my books, and presentations, and different events that I’ll be attending. Definitely check it out.
Dr. Pompa:
I appreciate your research, wealth of knowledge. Thank you for being on Cell TV. Hey, you’d be a great addition to one of my seminars as well. Appreciate it, thank you for coming on, great information.
Dr. Avena:
Thank you.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode which was brought to you by Fastonic molecular hydrogen. Please check it out at getfastonic.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 AM Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at podcast.drpompa.com. Please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing this show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening.
