28. Is Sugar Addictive or Do We Just Act Like It Is?

My name is Patrick McGilvray, and I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, running coach and mindset expert. I believe mindset is the most powerful and most underrated tool you have as a runner. So I’ve devoted my life to helping runners like you develop the mindset you need to fuel your inner fire and become the badass runner you were meant to be. This is the Running Mind podcast.

Hey there, and welcome to episode number 28 of the running mind podcast. My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m a weight loss coach for runners. And today I want to talk about whether or not sugar is addictive, or do we just act like it is? Sugar has been the subject of controversy since as far back as over 2000 years ago, there was a Hindu physician who wrote in I think it was like 78 AD.

And he wrote this, “Sugar promotes nutrition and corpulent c.” which is just an Old World word that means fatness or obesity. So he wrote that, “Sugar promotes nutrition and fatness, basically.” So we’ve known about this issue for quite some time now. Today, I think we all can agree that eating sugar, especially too much sugar, is bad idea.

Yet, the average American is consuming around 150 pounds of sugar a year, it’s crazy, we find it almost impossible to just say no to our favorite sugary treat. Willpower just doesn’t work here, it seems. So the question on the table is, is sugar addictive? Should sugar be treated more like a drug than a nutrient? Do we even need to eat sugar? I’m going to get into all of this, in this episode of the podcast is chock full of goodness here.

Which is a good transition into talking about our July no sugar challenge in the Facebook group. So if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Running Lean community on Facebook. It’s a group of like minded runners and people who want to get lean and become lean running machines. And it kind of goes hand in hand with this podcast.

And for the whole month of July. I’m doing some extensive training around the topic of sugar. Not eating sugar, the benefits of not eating sugar. And in the group, we are doing this together. So we’re on like day eight or nine right now. The day this comes out, I think we’ll be on like day 10 of no sugar.

But in the group, I’m doing some weekly trainings and answering questions like how many carbs should I be eating? I’m feeling lightheaded, I’m feeling a little lethargic. What do I do about that? How do I fix that? How many beers can I have a day? Very important questions we’re talking about in the group.

But anyway, the best part of this group is that it’s fun. It’s the community aspect of it. It’s supportive. It’s encouraging. In fact, here’s a recent comment from one of the members in the group, Leslie, and she says, “I need to thank you for this group and your podcasts. When I first heard about the challenge, I thought to myself that I could never do it. But I followed all of your posts and podcasts and I’ve done really well this week. I’ve had some crabby moments, but I’m down four pounds, which is extremely motivating. Now, I know I can do this for the entire month and more. Thank you for all your guidance and support.”

Leslie, thank you. Thanks for doing the work. I’m just here as your guide. You’re doing the work. Leslie you are kicking butt and a bunch of other people like Leslie are kicking butt to several people are posting that they’ve lost four or five pounds in the first week alone. So many amazing, amazing fun stories. So many strong courageous people in this group. Definitely come check it out. Just go on Facebook and search for the Running Lean community.

And it’s not too late. We’ve just started we’re only you know, eight or 10 days into this okay. Honestly, you can quit eating sugar anytime you want. Why not just do it now and do it with some friends to wisdom support. It’s awesome.

Okay, so the question on the table is sugar addictive? Or do we just act like it is? So I want to go back and give you a little bit of history about sugar and how this kind of all started okay, I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about this but there’s a couple of things that are kind of important.

So you know sugar came mainly from the tropic regions. And it started to make its impact in the world and back in the 16th century. And these tropic regions were producing what are kind of known as the drug foods. So these are foods like coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, rum, which is just fermented sugar cane juice. And then, of course, sugar itself.

And many European empires were built upon these drug foods, you know, they used the trade of chocolate and tea and rum and tobacco, and sugar, to build empires. All of these foods have something in common, they are all considered powerful psychoactive substances. And most of them are considered somewhat addictive. Carbs, coffee, tea, chocolate, and tobacco were unique.

And that they became even more desirable and more powerful with the introduction of sugar or with the addition of sugar, so people would sweeten their tea with sugar. And this became the way that Europeans love drinking their tea. Same with coffee. Chocolate was one of those things that wasn’t really sweetened at first, but then when you, you know, throw some sugar in there, and you know, tamp down the bitterness with some milk, oh my gosh, it became wildly popular.

And so sugar consumption then increased throughout the colonized world as well. So anywhere where you found these items, your sugar was right there with them. Okay, so sugar just was like, boom, it just exploded in the world. And I want to talk a little bit about tobacco in particular, because there’s something that most people don’t know about tobacco.

So when you cure tobacco leaves, the way that they normally do it is they use a process that’s called flue curing. And what they do is they hang up the tobacco leaves in these hot barns. And they control the heat inside the barn by a fire that’s, it’s not inside the barn.

It’s actually outside, but they have like a flue that runs through the barn so they can control the temperature inside the barn. And what happens is the leaves dry out, they go from green to yellow to kind of brownish. And during this process, the leaves actually release some of their natural sugars. So they kind of turn some of their starches into sugars, like all most plants do.

Interestingly, when you cure tobacco in this way, the sugar in the tobacco actually makes it easier to inhale the smoke. Because if you wouldn’t, if you didn’t have the sugar in this in the tobacco, that sugar content, it makes it a lot harder to inhale so you can’t inhale as deeply. Cigars and pipes typically, were not cured. The tobacco wasn’t cured in the same way and so they weren’t as easy to inhale the tobacco in pipes and cigars.

But then they started doing something really ingenious. They started soaking the leaves in a sugar solution, or they called it a sauce. They called it saucing the tobacco. And so they would soak the leaves in this sugar. And then after they were cured, they would absorb all this extra sugar. And this is like back in in the early 1900s.

And then like around 1913 RJ Reynolds they came out with a Camel cigarette. So it was like the first commercially successful sugar sauced tobacco blend and it was a big hit. Right? It’s like the most popular cigarette out there. People couldn’t get enough of the Camel cigarette. And mostly it was because of the sugar.

Also when you burn sugar caramelizes and it actually produces a nice sweet flavor. I know for me as when I was a sugar addict. One of my favorite things was carmelized, like that burnt sugar like when you burn sugar just enough Oh my god. It’s like the most amazing thing in the world for me.

So this sweeter flavor made the tobacco even more pleasing. And they actually noted, the cigarette industry, noted that this more pleasing, sweeter flavor appeals more to women and adolescents. I know it’s crazy, right? But they were actually marketing their products to the you know, they wanted more adolescents and more women smoking so they added more sugar to make it more appealing.

And they actually used this soft tobacco in chewing tobacco as well and all that. So here’s what happens. You add all this sugar to cigarettes, cigarettes become even easier to inhale. Have you ever smoked cigarettes? I smoked cigarettes. And it’s so very easy to inhale smoke from cigarettes.

I also have smoked cigars. And I’ll tell you what, you cannot inhale cigar smoke. It will, it hurts, it makes you start coughing, it’s just it’s terrible experience but cigarettes are nice and smooth, right? It’s because of the sugar. So it makes it super easy to inhale super deeply, which means that more nicotine is getting delivered to your system.

So you get this more potent dose of the drug, the nicotine drug, you get this bigger rush. The problem with that is that the rush, you know is very temporary. So it makes you go back for more so you get this huge rush. And then you come down off of that and you need more. So you go back and smoke another cigarette and it’s insidious the way this works. It’s not the same with like cigars and pipes, like people don’t have the same sort of, they’re not as addictive because you’re not inhaling as deeply. Okay, it’s all thanks to sugar. Good job, guys.

Okay, so that’s kind of like one of the areas of study that’s, to me, it’s just really fascinating, and how we’ve kind of, you know, treated sugar as a drug or how it is, affects us as a drug. Also, as children, we have conditioned our children to see sugar as something really special. We use sugar as a reward for our kids, okay, if you get good grades, or if you have good behavior, you’ll get to eat some sugar, we’ll give you this candy bar.

Or if you eat all your dinner, you can now have some dessert, something sweet. Which never really made sense to me at all. It still doesn’t make sense. But we all know that sugar is, you know, we shouldn’t be eating a lot of it. So we ration sugar to our children, right? So we teach our kids at an early age that there’s something very special about sugar. It’s very special, you can’t eat too much of it. And this is weird, right? It’s like it’s unlike any other food. We don’t ration you know, carrots or Brussels sprouts, or anything else, or cheese or eggs to our kids.

But we ration sugar, why do we need to ration sugar to our children? Because we know it’s not good for them. And we know that there’s something about it that causes this craving, which I’m gonna get into in a minute with cravings and stuff.

But as adults, you know, as we grow up, we start to condition ourselves that sugar is somewhat synonymous with love. You know, we celebrate special occasions with sugar. We celebrate holidays with sugar everywhere, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, even funerals, there’s all kinds of sugar there.

And anytime we go on vacation, you know, if we’re eating sugar, it means we’re having fun. You know, it means we were happy. You know, if there’s sugar around we know we’re having a good time. Feels good. We’re happy, right? We even use sugar as affectionate nicknames for our loved ones we call them sweetie. And sweetie pie and honey and sweetheart. Even just hey, sugar.

You know, so our whole lives we’ve been conditioned to believe that sugar equals love and who doesn’t want to be loved, you know, who doesn’t want to love and be loved? So we have this fondness and this affection for sugar. That’s unlike any other nutrient, any other food out there. Why is this? Why Why? Why this fixation on sugar?

Well, one reason is because sugar makes us feel good. It feels good to eat sugar. So when we eat sugar it affects these reward centers of our brain. You know we eat some sugar, and it stimulates the release of this neurotransmitter called dopamine and dopamine makes us feel good. It lights up the same place in the brain that alcohol and nicotine cocaine, even heroin light up. Here’s an interesting thing though.

Powerful psychoactive drugs like cocaine and heroin, they only stimulate and light up like this one spot in the brain and sugar lights up that same spot to one reward center. But sugar, unlike those other ones, lights up areas all over the brain, one doctor said, it lights up the brain like a pinball machine. That’s sugar, that’s the difference.

So it makes us feel good, lights up all these receptors in our brain, it turns on our brain, we feel good. And we want more of it. And the more refined the drug, the bigger the hit of dopamine it so when you refine something, you increase the surface area for the drug to have an effect.

For example, chewing on coca leaves will give you a mild, it’s a mild stimulant, versus grinding those up into powder, like for powdered cocaine is a very powerful stimulant, versus then taking that and smoking it in like crack cocaine, which is an even more intense experience.

It’s very similar with sugar, so you could like chew on sugar cane, which people used to do back in the day. And sugar cane is just like it’s a big grass, you know, it’s part of the grass family. So you could chew on sugar cane, you’d get, you know, a little bit of a hit of dopamine or whatever.

But then you refine that sugar into crystals or even a fine powder. And you increase the surface area, and you increase the amount of dopamine that gets released and you increase the pleasure of the substance. And then what happens is just like other drugs, like alcohol or heroin, the more you do, the less dopamine gets released.

So dopamine actually down regulates when you continually drink alcohol or do cocaine or eat sugar. So the more you have, the more of the substance you eat, or ingest, or smoke or shoot or whatever. The more at first, the more dopamine gets released, but then dopamine starts down regulate and you become what they call like dopamine resistant.

And drug addicts and alcoholics know this very well, it takes more and more of the drug to get the same rush. And so we end up eating a lot more sugar to get the same sort of feeling the same experience that we used to get, so it takes more sugar to feel good.

And we all know, and I’ve talked about this extensively how, you know, eating sugar, you know, creates glucose, excess glucose in our system, which, you know, makes us produce more insulin, which is the fat storage hormone. And that’s why we get fat because we’re eating sugar, and our insulin is always high.

And the same thing kind of the same thing happens with insulin. So as our body’s producing insulin all the time, our bodies become insulin resistant, meaning that we can’t produce enough insulin to bring our blood sugar down. So our blood sugar continues to go high. And so more and more insulin keeps getting produced, but it’s not doing anything.

And so we’re just in this massive cycle of storing fat, and we just become fatter and fatter and more obese. And we get diabetes and all kinds of things. Very similar to the dopamine resistance in our bodies that happens with consuming sugar or other drugs over long periods of time.

And they’ve even found, they’ve done these studies on rats that show that rats actually prefer sugar over other drugs. They prefer sugar over cocaine. So they did these experiments and these poor rats, I gotta tell you, you know, what did we ever do? What did they ever do to us? We’re so we do all these terrible experiments on rats.

But anyway, that’s another episode altogether. Anyway, so they do these studies on rats, where they got them addicted to cocaine for like, several months, okay, that’s why I’m saying poor rats. They get them addicted to cocaine for several months.

And then they’re like, hey, try this sugar and they give them like sugar water. And within two days, the rats switch over from preferring the cocaine to their sugar water. They like prefer sugar within two days of being completely addicted to this very powerful psychoactive drug cocaine.

Rats also preferred Oreos. Apparently, rats preferred Oreos over cocaine and morphine by what they call “a significant margin”. Okay, so they gave him like they got these addicted cocaine addicted rats. And they’re like, hey, what about Oreos? What do you think about these? And they’re like, heck yeah. Bring on the Oreos.

I want more of that cocaine. No, no morphine, not interested. But Oreos? Heck, yes. Give me more of those. So for rats anyway, I know we’re not rats. But just for rats anyway, sugar is more pleasurable than these powerful psychoactive, highly addictive drugs. And some studies suggest that sugar is actually around eight times more addictive than some of these drugs like cocaine, eight times more addictive. Which is crazy.

Now that that number may be high, let’s just say it’s, it’s five times more addictive, or four, or three or twice, or even the same. Oh, my God, that’s still too much. It’s crazy. So when it comes to addiction, I have some extensive knowledge in this area. I’ve been sober for 13 years, I was addicted to alcohol, I had a problem with drinking.

I have extensive knowledge of this disease, the disease of alcoholism, and this world of addiction and recovery. And there are some glaring similarities between sugar and alcohol, and the effects that they have on our brains and our bodies.

So some of the traits of alcohol addiction are that it is something that you crave all the time. It’s something that you can never get enough of. And for me, like when I was drinking, I was obsessed about it. I was thinking about it all the time. If I wasn’t drinking, I was thinking about drinking.

And I knew it was bad for me, but I kept drinking anyway, I knew it was having negative consequences on me physically and in my life. I knew that drinking alcohol was slowly killing me. But I didn’t care. The feeling that I got from the alcohol from being drunk was more important than my health.

And it got to this point where this is not a good place to be where I couldn’t, I couldn’t drink anymore. I couldn’t not drink. I couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t live without it. And sugar is incredibly similar. You know, not too long ago, just a few months ago, I would tell myself, I gotta stop eating sugar. But I was thinking about it all the time.

You know, I was going through a divorce. And you know, we started with this whole COVID thing. And, you know, there’s a lot going on, and I was you know, having a hard time getting through the day. But I was always thinking like, okay, at the end of the day, I’m going to eat my Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, because this that was my go to Ben Jerry’s Cherry Garcia, or anything with caramel in it is just amazing.

And when I think about it all day, like I just got to make it through the day so I can get to the ice cream. And, but I would tell myself, like I got to stop doing this, I’m gaining all this weight, I’m having all these negative consequences. I know it’s bad for me, but I am doing it anyway. It’s having negative consequences on me mentally and emotionally and physically.

I’m gaining a lot of weight, I’ve gained a lot of weight, put on like 40 pounds. And I would find myself at the grocery store, you know, doing my shopping and like I’m not buying any ice cream and then I’d go down that aisle and I just throw three or four pints of Ben and Jerry’s into the cart without even like thinking about it was like uh, it was like a subconscious habit almost.

But like, there was almost like a screw it attitude. Like, you know what, I know, this is bad for me, but I don’t care. The feeling I’m gonna get from this is more important than, you know, the fact that I’m gaining all this weight. I don’t care about that. You know, the promise of the sugar high was more powerful than any willpower that I had.

And I got to this place, just like with alcohol where I was like, I gotta stop doing this. I can’t. I couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t live without it. So similar. It’s eerie. And both alcohol and sugar. They’re hard to quit, man. I’ll tell you what is hard. Do come to the place where you’re like, I gotta stop doing this. You know, they both have withdrawal symptoms. You know, with alcohol, it’s it can be pretty intense. You know, your body goes through some, some crazy, crazy stuff.

It depends on how much you’re drinking a day. But that can be you, some people need hospitalization to get through alcohol withdrawal. And the sugar withdrawal can be bad too. You know, with sugar withdrawal, you’re going to experience headaches, lightheadedness, nausea, lethargy, just massive lack of energy, which is really troublesome.

As runners, it can be really hard those first few weeks, you can just be just feeling like you just have no energy and running is so hard your legs just feel like you’re you’ve got cinder blocks attached to them. And that’s all part of the, you know, withdrawal from sugar.

And the Alcoholics Anonymous has this book, it’s their Bible, it’s called The Big Book. And they even suggested there to use sugar and sugary foods like candy and chocolate, to help soothe the cravings for alcohol to help people wean themselves off of alcohol. And it kind of helps ease the severity of the withdrawal symptoms for alcoholics. Which, you know, it does help with that. But then there’s people that like start getting addicted to sugar when they get sober, because they eat all this chocolate, I’m not drinking alcohol, but then they eat all this candy and chocolate and stuff like that.

And again, a bunch of weight, but they use sugar as a way of like, increasing the dopamine that they’re getting. So they continue to kind of feel good, without the super negative consequences of you know, of alcohol. And then, you know, both sugar and alcohol, they’re both socially acceptable to do in public, and they’re perfectly legal, right?

Unlike cocaine, or heroin, which you know, those drugs are bad. We all know that those drugs are bad. But sugar or alcohol, no big deal. I mean, you’re kind of considered weird. If you go to a party and you don’t drink or you don’t eat cake. Right? I mean, you’re almost like an outcast.

When I stopped drinking, I had people telling me like, why not just have a drink? It’s no big deal. I’m like, no, you don’t understand I got, I can’t do this. Can’t do this at all. And it’s kind of like with sugar, too. There’s a lot of peer pressure. People are like, well, I made this cake. You really have to, you have to eat some.

It’s like no, I don’t, back off. So do we even need sugar? Do we even need to eat sugar? The answer to that is no, we don’t, we don’t need to eat sugar. As humans, we don’t need it, we only need to consume two nutrients. We only need to consume two things that our bodies don’t naturally produce.

Our bodies are really amazing. They produce all these natural nutrients that we need to live very healthy lives. But there’s two things that we have to eat, we have to get our essential amino acids from externally, we don’t produce those ourselves. So we need to eat those. And we get all those from eating protein. And we also need to eat fat.

Because our body does not create essential fatty acids, we have to eat fat in order to get those. So those are the only two things amino acids and fatty acids, so fat and protein. If you don’t eat any fat, or you don’t eat any protein, you will die. But if you don’t ever eat sugar or carbohydrates, again, you’re going to be fine.

And actually your liver produces all the glucose you need because you do need glucose sugar in your system, your brain needs a certain amount of glucose, and your liver produces all the glucose that you need. So you don’t have to worry about it. Your body is fine. producing its own glucose even as an endurance athlete, even as a runner. So this is fascinating. You’re gonna like this part.

How does this all apply to running and runners? So they did this study called the faster study and the title of the study is this metabolic characteristics of keto adapted ultra endurance athletes. And so what they did was they took 20 elite, ultra endurance athletes, so marathoners, ultra marathoners, Ironman Distance triathletes, and they divided them up into two groups. One was a traditional group eating a high carbohydrate diet, right? Pretty traditional ultra athletes. The other group, so there’s 10 athletes in each group, the other group were on a low carbohydrate high fat diet, and they had become fat-adapted.

And one ofthe runners that was in this fat-adapted group was Zach Bitter, and Zach Bitter is a badass. Zach Bitter holds a world record for the 100 mile run, which he did on track. And he ran 100 miles in 11 hours and 19 minutes. And he also holds the world record for the 12 hour run where he ran 104.8 miles. And just to give you an idea of what that looks like, 100 miles at 11 hours and 19 minutes is his pace was 6:47 for 100 miles.

Now Zach Bitter follows a low carbohydrate, high fat diet. And he is a fat adapted runner, meaning that he uses mostly his own body fat as fuel. Okay, so they had these two groups of athletes, I just wanted to give you that heads up, like he’s an amazing dude. And he was in this study, I think that’s really cool.

So they had these two groups, one eating the traditional low carbohydrate, high fat diet, so they had already become fat adapted, and then the traditional high carb group, okay. And they had them both perform the same intensity, I think it was like a 180 minute run on a treadmill. And they’re measuring all this stuff.

And, and all these people, like have similar pedigrees, you know, they have similar experiences, and they’re ranked and they do similar, you know, types of events like they’re very, very similar. Anyway, at the end of the day, they found basically no differences in glycogen utilization, storage, or repletion, between the two groups.

So the high carb group, and the low carb group looked basically the same. When it came to the amount of glycogen their muscles were using, it was available to their muscles before, during and after exercise. One group’s eating a ton of sugar and carbs, the other is virtually eating, no sugar, and no carbs. So to me, that’s really fascinating.

And it’s just, you know, further proof that you can be an incredible, incredible endurance athlete, and not have to eat sugar at all. I’m going to link to this study in the show notes notes for this episode, which you can find at therunningmindpocast.com/28.

Because it is fascinating, it is really, really interesting. And if you want to geek out on a ton of science, it’s all there for you. And I read through it, and it’s oh my gosh, it’s really, really cool. But basically, your body will produce all the glycogen you need.

So you don’t need to eat sugar, we just don’t need to eat it. And when you use your own fat for fuel, you’re gonna get more energy. So you get four calories of energy from glucose, nine calories of energy from fat, so you get basically more than twice the energy from fat than you do from glycogen.

And you can only store so much sugar in your body when you’re running. But you’ll basically never run out of fat for fuel because, hey, runners, on the whole, we carry around too much body fat. And I think it’s because we consume way too much sugar, way too many carbohydrates.

And runners rely on sugar and carbs for fuel. So we can never get enough. So we need more and more and more. But there’s so many benefits of becoming a fat-adapted athlete, and that’s, you know, the big picture, but I’m trying to teach here. But are runners addicted to sugar? I think it’s highly, highly possible. I think it’s worth somebody looking into, I would love to see some studies on this, but I hear about it all the time from my runners. I mean I hear it every day, people talk about how they need to get off the sugar addiction. It’s crazy. So is sugar an addictive substance? Or do we just act like it is?

There’s a journalist and historian Charles Seaman. And he posited this question he wondered whether sugar is actually an addictive substance or if people just act like it is. And my thing is like if everyone’s acting like it is and the evidence is pretty clear. The answer to that question becomes pretty clear as well.

And you know, scientists have concluded that sugar is both a nutrient and a carbohydrate and a psychoactive substance with addictive characteristics. At the end of the day, you got to make the choice. Do you want to continue to eat sugar or not? It’s up to you. And don’t look to the food industry to like help you make this decision because they’re going to fight against this idea that sugar is addictive with everything that they’ve got.

And of course, the reason is that there is sugar in everything. And if you haven’t listened to the last podcast, you got to listen to that one for sure. It’s called there’s sugar in everything. So don’t think you’re gonna start seeing health warnings on foods that contain sugar anytime soon.

Now, like you see on packs of cigarettes, because calling sugar evil or saying sugar is bad for you is the equivalent of like stealing Christmas, you know, and taking all the love out of your life. So don’t wait for the government to issue warnings on labels, just quit, just stop eating sugar, you can do it.

And if you’re ready to stop now, if you’re ready to become a fat-adapted runner, come join us in the Running Lean community on Facebook, the sugar, the no sugar challenge is on member we’re just about 10 days into it. So come join us. Grab a few friends to do it with you. It’s really fun. We’re having a good time.

Lots of interesting questions and answers in the group. Just go to Facebook and search for the Running Lean community and join us. So that’s all I got for you today. As always, lots and lots of love to each and every one of you, my friends keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve tried to lose weight by running miles and miles, are starving yourself, and you’ve had zero results, you are not alone. This model of weight loss is broken. It’s never worked, and it has to be replaced. That’s why I created a powerful new training just for you called How to Become a Lean Running Machine. You’ll discover why running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and you’ll learn the three secrets of losing weight and keeping it off for good to get this free training right now just go to therunningmindpodcast.com/lean and learn how you can become a lean running machine.