Years ago, decades ago in fact, even before it was commonly thought that sugar made kids "bounce off the walls," my farsighted friend David Healy insisted that sugar was a drug. At the time (back in high school) I scoffed, being a skeptic of the quasi-traditional variety.
But according to the latest in brain research, David was right. Leading researcher Nora Volkow, the first scientist to study addiction via infrared detection in the brain, and currently the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said in a Q&A in the September issue:
In rats, it has been shown that, if you give them very high-sugar diets and then make them give them an opioid antagonist (naloxone), you can trigger a withdrawal that is similar to that you observe when you give naloxone to an animal that has received repeated injections of morphine. This indicated that chronic exposure to high sugar diets generated physical dependence.
Gives this advertisement a bit of an edge, doesn't it?
