Things the Food Industry Doesn't Want You to Know

There has also been a whole lot of attention recently, again in both the research literature and popular press, around the issue of sugar being addictive. And once again, we need not wade too deep into controversy to extract what we need.

We refer, in the vernacular, to a "sweet tooth," not a sugar tooth, and we have it exactly right. Sweet is a neurophysiological response - it's the way particular nerve cells communicate their awareness of a particular stimulus to the brain. The reaction is much the same, no matter what the sweet stimulus is. As the "sweet tooth" expression suggests, it's sweet we like and sweet we want. That sweet can come from sugar, or corn syrup, or agave or aspartame. Sweet is sweet.

The questions about addiction notwithstanding, it is pretty clear that the more sweet we get, the more we tend to need to feel satisfied. Bathe taste buds in sweet all day long, and they need much higher concentrations to take notice. And that's just what artificial sweeteners do. Those sweeteners now predominant in the food supply range in sweetness intensity from 600 to roughly 1300 times as sweet as sugar.

My impression - based in part on 20 years of clinical experience - is that feeding a sweet tooth with sweetness from any source helps it grow into a sweet fang, much inclined to take over your appetite and your life.

guān yú dǎ diàn huà de xiào huà wǔ gè jīng diǎn de 

yī 、yǐ qián shǒu jī xìn hào xiāng dāng bù hǎo ，suǒ yǐ duǎn xìn shén me de jīng cháng huì yǒu yán chí ，hěn wǎn cái huì bèi jiē shōu dào 。yǒu gè dà xué nǚ shēng ，zài xué xiào shàng gōng kāi kè ，páng biān de yí gè nán shēng pā zhuō zi shàng shuì zháo le ，liú le yī zhuō zi kǒu shuǐ 。