Dear Reader,

During marking uni assignments, I went into sugar overload. One day, I bought some biscuits so I could 'have one or two for tea'. They disappeared so quickly that I wasn't even sure what happened. So, let's talk sugar!

Sugar and happiness

Well, don't we often think sugar is happiness? I mean the first bite into a sweet warm baked good or the first licks of an delicious ice cream. Heaven - right? And don't even get me started on chocolate... yeah, yeah, I know it's not really good for us but just let me indulge for just a moment, at least in my head. That's not ending up on my hips and show in my blood sugar levels.

Ok, I'm done. Now, we all (probably?) know that our ancestors - I'm talking about anything before roughly 5000 years ago... those who hunted in the wild and gathered veggies, nuts, eggs and fruits - so, those ancestors loved sugar. It gave them energy, it was rare and their bodies were build to deal with it. Maybe, I should even say glucose and include anything starchy like root veggies, grains etc. They didn't get their hands on those things all year round in whichever amount they wanted. So, their bodies and glucose levels could handle it all well. No diabetes, heart problems or obesity.

To encourage that kind of energy intake, human brains (I believe it started much earlier with monkey brains) developed the release to Dopamin. Dopamin gives us pleasure and counts as happy hormone. (Although there is a lot of evidence that it doesn't make us happy because it's also responsible for addiction patterns.) Anyways, to cut this a bit short - sugar gives us pleasure and makes us happy (at least briefly). There you have it.

Sugar causing unhappiness

If you go to the extreme of diabetes, heart problems and obesity, I assume we can safely agree that sugar causes unhappiness. It doesn't matter if we talk sugar or glucose (which includes starch and fiber). By the way, sugar is sugar. There is no "healthy" sugar and fruit juice is sugar too (read Glucose Revolution).

Too much sugar intake causes us becoming hangry with our moods crashing and us grumpily reaching for the next chocolate happiness burst. Also, if you consume a lot of sugar, you deal with gut bacteria imbalance which probably leads to fun stuff like bloating, yeast infections, digestion issues and immune system problems (catching colds all the time?). I'd say it leads to feeling uncomfortable a lot. Gut bacteria imbalances can also cause depression because Serotonin - another of those happy hormones - is produced in the gut. Eating too much sugar destroys the balance and not enough Serotonin is produced.

What now?

So, I summarise all of the above with - sugar can make you happy short term and unhappy to very unhappy long term. Most of us know that already, I guess. So, what should we do? First of all, it really depends on how you do it. I believe that most of us don't have to cut out all sugar. You can do that but it does make us happy and gives us energy. Why not keep such pleasures in our lives?

Yeah, I'm going towards my usual recommendation - mindfulness and being present so that you can intentionally enjoy and savour the experience. It's great stuff but it comes at a cost. Savouring makes it worth that cost and most likely keeps the cost lower as well.

But there is another aspect. Think about when you most crave sugar. It's when your energy is low. When you are tired or overwhelmed. I experimented a lot with taking a rest instead of consuming sugar. I really had to cut my consumption and rest absolutely helped. With my current too high marking load I ask too much from mybody and my body asks for more energy. That explains those disappearing biscuits.

My learnings are therefore: when you crave something sweet (including chips etc. don't kid yourself) see if you can take a break. When you consume sugar, try to enjoy and savour mindfully. I believe then we get some happiness out of that devil sugar :-). What do you think?

Have a very happy and maybe sweet week!

Anja