Healthy Bites: The Snack Food Trap: SUGAR!!

Healthy Bites: "The Snack Food Trap" By Laura Beil, Newsweek

I was making my usual late-afternoon trip to the breakroom in search of something tasty - when a giant doughnut cought my eye.  To my disappointment It was only a picture - but it got the point across. I was falling into the Snack Food Trap.

The article brings up the concept of food having a drug-like control over some people.  this means considering your relationship to junk food as a type of addiction rather than just being someone who needs to go on a diet.  As we begin to change our eating habits it is a recovery process from those addictive foods. New research is showing that our brains have a similar reaction to high sugar/carb/fat foods as it would with addictive drugs.  This also explains why many people recovering from drug/alcohol/cigarets will turn to food to fill the void. 

One of the biggest pitfalls now (and my addiction) is SUGAR!  There is hidden sugar in almost every processed food we eat which adds up to a massive sugar intake and lots of empty calories.  In research studies rats were willing to go through mild electric shock to obtain sweet sugary food. 

PET scans show that the activation in the brain when eating these addictive foods strongly resembles the brain of a drug addict.  It was also found that pregnant rats fed a high fat/sugar/carb diet had offspring that sought out these same foods.  Our habits have a lot to do with it - studies found that when we eat high fat/sugar/carb foods we will tend to crave them and seek them out more frequently. 

so why do we crave sertain foods?
why is it so hard to resist some foods?
why do some of us have more will power to resist than others?

The verdict is still out as to weather or not we can put our relationship to unhealthy food in the same category as drug addiction, but this is an interesting way to look at it.  I can understand the connection- I considered my diet to be pretty healthy until I took a close look at my sugar intake.  I was really shocked to see how much sugar was in foods that I eat daily- bread, Tomato sauce, yougurt, salad dressing, cereal.  When I started to cut back my sugar intake I could feel myself craving anything with sugar in it. It is going to be much harder than I expected to break my sugar habit.  But for starters I will stop looking for doughnuts in the breakroom!