The addiction response from the delicious baked treats are indistinguishable from drugs.
Researchers at the University of Bordeaux say that the brain’s response to chocolate chip cookies is the same as its response to cocaine and THC. While such equivalencies are overblown, the claims are rooted in sound science—a testament to the complexity of mental health and addiction.
“Available evidence in humans shows that sugar and sweetness can induce reward and craving that are comparable in magnitude to those induced by addictive drugs,” the study’s abstract reads.
Your Brain’s Response
The reason for the addiction responses in the brain by chocolate chip cookies are due to the effects of its individual components, the study explains. The sweetest ingredient in cookies, sugar, has a powerful effect on the human mind, lighting up similar pathways as cocaine.
There’s a biological reason for this, as evolutionary pressures drove our ancestors to seek sustenance that was extremely high in calories. In other words, seeking out that feelgood hit of sugar was what separated those who lived and those who died back in the stone age. Our inheritance of this sugar-seeking trait is what makes dessert so darn tempting to us today, manifesting as a literal primal urge to cram it in our mouths.
Chocolate & Marijuana
Chocolate, on the other hand, gives us pleasure in a different way. Its bittersweet, melty flavor and texture hits our brains the same way as marijuana.
Putting these two potent ingredients together is what drove the chocolate chip cookie to become a timeless classic that has driven many children—and adults—to eat so many that they literally get sick.
Junk food and fast food companies know we can’t stop, driving Americans into a high-calorie, low-nutrient diet that leads to heart disease, cancer and diabetes—the leading causes of death and disability in the United States, according to the CDC.
Research has shown that the pull of sugars is so powerful that lab rats actually prefer a hit of sugar to a hit of drugs. It’s reasonable, considering cocaine does not contain life-sustaining sustenance.
“Overall, this research has revealed that sugar and sweet reward can not only substitute to addictive drugs, like cocaine, but can even be more rewarding and attractive,” the study’s abstract continues. “At the neurobiological level, the neural substrates of sugar and sweet reward appear to be more robust than those of cocaine (i.e., more resistant to functional failures), possibly reflecting past selective evolutionary pressures for seeking and taking foods high in sugar and calories.”
This research hasn’t proven to be an accurate model of human behavior, however. In 2016, the sales of marijuana in legal states exceeded the expenditures on Girl Scout Cookies, Oreos, Pringles, and Dasani bottled water…combined.
Low-nutrient foods, plentiful in the American diet, are made of ingredients which can cause the same effects in the brain as mind-altering substances.
Lifestyle diseases include diabetes, obesity, stroke, heart disease, smoking, and substance use disorder. According to the CDC, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are the leading causes of death and disability in the U.S.
Trying to Quit Everything in Sobriety
When I finally quit rum and cocaine, I wanted to change everything about my lifestyle immediately. With close to no impulse control and without alcohol and drugs to distance me from my feelings, I was a revved up raw nerve of angst. My original plan was to quit smoking, lose ten pounds, and quit picking the wrong guys. Thankfully, when I was newly sober I made a new friend, let’s call her “Anne.”
“I’m getting fat,” I told Anne two weeks after we met. “I need to go on a strict diet. I can’t let myself put on even more weight now that I’m quitting cigarettes.”
Anne said, “Crash diets rarely work and smoking is one of the toughest habits to break. The way to get healthy is to tackle one problem at a time. For now, maybe putting down drinking and drugging is enough.”
Anne gave me that excellent advice decades ago. We’re still friends and it’s been educational watching her change over the years. Unlike me, she preferred living at a thoughtful and slower pace. Many of her great habits like meditation, mindfulness, and exercise rubbed off on me.
After two years clean, I met a woman who’d had throat cancer. She had a huge scar across her neck and talked like a frog. I ran home that night, threw out my brand-new carton of Newports and quit cigs cold turkey. I began going to the gym. Two years after that big change, I went to Weight Watchers and lost 12 pounds and I’ve kept it off. But I was still in love with sugar and picked up compulsively chewing Bazooka Joe. Anne didn’t like sweets, which I could never understand. She said they made her feel like she’d had too many cups of coffee. She also drank decaf.
Addicted to Sugar
I’d been a sugar addict since childhood; I used to sell my lunches to kids on line in the cafeteria and sneak to the corner store for Milky Ways and Snickers. Due to the high cost of dentists, I finally switched to sugar-free gums like Extra and Trident but when an old filling was pulled loose, I was done with gum.
Everyone knows that sugar isn’t good for you, right? I’d read Sugar Blues as a teen while dating a health nut. And I knew that diet soda wasn’t full of vitamins and nutrients, but I didn’t want to dig too deeply into its ingredients. Anne mentioned it a few times so I’d glanced at articles about aspartame here and there but the truth is, I avoided learning about it because I didn’t want to know. I love soda. I’ve tried to give it up many times without success. Based on Anne’s suggestion, I switched to water but couldn’t keep it going after a few short spurts. The longest I ever went was two weeks — water was boring. I always gleefully ran back to Diet Coke and Diet Cherry Pepsi.
In 2017, Donald Trumpannounced “We’re going to be cutting regulations at a level that nobody’s ever seen before.” Since then, I’ve wondered who is approving what and if anyone is checking anything anymore. For all we know, big companies are paying big amounts of money to keep us eating crap. That’s when it first hit me that I should become a more informed consumer; I knew it was stupid to keep ignoring what I was ingesting. But by that time, I was in the habit of making changes slowly and not in the informed way Anne did. I was putting off quitting anything else but it was starting to gnaw at me.
The Diet Soda Trap
At a recent work conference, I met a handful of health and wellness experts. While chatting I asked, “How bad is it that I’ve been addicted to diet soda for-like-ever?” Talking stopped, heads whirled toward me, jaws fell slack and I felt like an idiot.
“It’s full of toxic chemicals,” one said, finally breaking the silence.
“Aspartame is the worst,” said another.
A third woman chimed in with sarcasm. “It’s great if you love mood swings and gaining weight.”
That evening I googled articles about aspartame and additional sugar substitutes. The more I read, the more it reminded me of the immutable hold that cocaine had had on me. When I was in rehab I’d learned that my addiction had nothing to do with me being a “bad” person or having weak, wimpy willpower and everything to do with brain pathways and ingrained habits. By the time I left treatment, I had a newfound understanding that no matter how many times I’d tried to quit snorting sparkly white powder, my brain was as trained as any of Pavlov’s dogs. Through the repetition over many years, my brain had developed deep grooves and these ingrained patterns became triggers for my Pavlovian compulsion to sniff out and snort up rewards.
So here I am with all this knowledge that any self-destructive habit I want to break is going to take work. It means changing my lifestyle until I build new brain pathways or at least block off the old ones.
Soon after reading more about aspartame, I received a timely email from Jaya Jaya Myra (née Myra Rodriguez), with a link to her new TEDx talk. I remembered Myra’s strong background in neuroscience, which gave her opinion more weight in my mind. I knew she looked for solutions to her problems by studying her own brain, and that she sometimes found life-changing answers. Myra became a nutritionist, healer, Tedx-talker, and bestselling author of the book Vibrational Healing: Attain Balance & Wholeness. Understand Your Energetic Type, which I’d already read.
I was impressed by the new talk, so I asked her to meet me for lunch.
The Connection Between Trauma and Illness
“I cured myself of debilitating fibromyalgia,” she said as we sat in a diner. “Doctors couldn’t help me. The pain was debilitating and I lost everything—my job, my marriage, the bank foreclosed on my home, I couldn’t take care of myself or my three kids. When I was at my lowest point, I knew I had to figure out how I went from being totally healthy to completely debilitated.”
She described a long road to self-discovery that included meeting a Native American healer and Eastern medicine practitioners. “In Western medicine,” she said, “they focus on treating the symptoms, but fibromyalgia is a mysterious illness with no known causes or cures. Doctor after doctor treated me like I was an emotional female and it was all in my head.”
The only way to get better was to pinpoint the source of the problem. She went into therapy, worked hard, and found out she had repressed traumatic childhood memories. Her mother was an alcoholic who couldn’t take care of herself or of her daughter. Myra was neglected and traumatized and had developed self-destructive habits that made things worse.
I told her about my recent research. “Diet stuff can cause many more problems because of chemical sweeteners,” she said. “Aspartame is used in diet soda, sugar-free gum, yogurts, and so much more. It’s one of the worst sugar substitutes because it tricks your brain into thinking, ‘Ooh, sweet taste. I’m going to get a reward. But diet sodas don’t do that, they inhibit good hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin. So you’re not satiated and it makes you crave more. It actually increases your appetite and wreaks havoc with your moods—depression, anxiety.”
Next I reached out to Emily Boller, author of Starved to Obesity, a self-help book about her journey out of food addiction. “Modern-day foods are completely abnormal,” she said. “They promote disease. I never chose depression. I didn’t want an addiction to food.”
Like Myra, Boller believes that eating disorders are symptoms of underlying conditions “like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.” And, like Myra, Boller had experienced her own trauma. “My son Daniel died by suicide in 2012, in part it was due to his addiction to artificial and processed foods. He had type 1 Diabetes.”
If Daniel’s blood sugar got too high, the avalanche of brain-damaging spikes would create a medical delirium called metabolic encephalopathy, with symptoms like psychosis. He was only 21 when he died. Losing her son sent her into shock, then a “suffocating depression.” She’d struggled with food since childhood—first with binge eating and weight gain which brought on cruel teasing in school. In her teens, she swung the other way, dangerously into anorexia. As an adult she became obese.
Craving Low-Nutrient Foods
“You know that you’re addicted to a certain food if you try to give it up but the cravings are so strong you cave,” said Boller. “Our bodies weren’t meant to eat artificially sweetened shakes, diet soda, sugar-free Jell-O, pudding or protein bars.”
Boller raves about her doctor, Joel Fuhrman, MD, a six-time bestselling author and president of the Nutritional Research Foundation who specializes in preventing and reversing diseases through nutrition. Boller credits Dr. Fuhrman for teaching her a whole new lifestyle. What she shared was in keeping with what Jaya Jaya Myra had said about aspartame, chemicals and nutrition.
Dr. Fuhrman taught Boller about addictive substances. “They activate the reward system and cause the brain to demand more and more.” Boller learned that willpower is no match for addictive drives and that low-nutrient foods — high in calories, intensely sweet, salty, or fatty — make up the majority of the standard American diet. “The ingredients cause the same effects in the brain that mind-altering substances do.”
Here’s one way to think of addiction: Imagine walking in a field of grass. When you walk to one spot, you make a connection that gives your brain a good feeling, just like when an opioid floods your brain with a rush of dopamine. Now, imagine going back to that spot so you can have that pleasurable experience again. With each repetition you have matted down the grass in the field into a pathway. It would be odd to walk any other way than along the pathway that directly leads to the brain’s reward. When your brain doesn’t get the expected reward, it keeps craving it and looking for it.
“That’s why whenever you want to change a habit,” said Myra, “you need to replace it with something positive until you build a new pathway.”
“Whether it’s drugs, sex, gambling or whatever, you’re looking at impulse-control disorders where people have difficulty refraining from maladaptive use,” said one expert.
Video gaming, shopping, social media use, sex—according to The Guardian, the scope of what falls into “addiction” has broadened in recent years. Rather than just including alcohol, tobacco and drugs, other substances and habits now fall under the definition.
This is because those in neuroscience have determined that the same brain chemical, dopamine, is responsible for these cravings.
“The range of what people are getting addicted to has increased,” Michael Lynskey, professor of addiction at King’s College London, told The Guardian. “For my parents’ generation, the only options were tobacco and alcohol. Now there are more drugs, including synthetics, along with commercialisation and ways – especially online – of encouraging prolonged use of different things.”
Henrietta Bowden-Jones, a consultant psychiatrist involved with the UK’s future NHS internet-addiction clinic, said many of these newer conditions are behavioral instead of physical.
“I saw [a gaming disorder patient] yesterday,” she told The Guardian, “who then went on to spending money on objects and clothes. You can somehow shift the behaviour but it’s an illness we don’t yet know enough about.”
Even so, not everyone in the field agrees that emerging disorders necessarily classify as addiction. According to The Guardian, the only two to officially make the WHO list of addictions are gambling and gaming.
However, Lynskey argued, many of these conditions do meet the standard criteria for addiction diagnosis, including the inability to stop as well as withdrawals.
“If a teenager becomes irritable when a gaming session is cut short, there’s some discussion as to whether that’s a sort of mild withdrawal,” Lynskey said.
According to the research of Terry Robinson, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, dopamine is the neurochemical behind cravings in any form.
“Whether it’s drugs, sex, gambling or whatever, you’re looking at impulse-control disorders where people have difficulty refraining from maladaptive use,” he told The Guardian. “There are certainly similarities in terms of the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms involved.”
Robinson said three factors—an environment full of craving-inducing stimuli, dosage and access—combine to increase the likelihood of problematic habits and uses.
Lynskey told The Guardian that like with anything else, there is a range when it comes to problematic behavior.
“There is a spectrum,” he said, “whether it’s alcohol or drug dependence or shopping addiction and people have become a bit happier with placing the point at which behaviour becomes problematic at a lower level of use.”
According to Bowden-Jones, there are a number of ways to treat such disorders. However, certain ones become unique because they are impossible to avoid, such as the internet.
“Younger generations will be socially cut off,” said Bowden-Jones, “and what our patients say is when they feel they’re missing out, it pushes them more toward the virtual life that they already have a problem with rather than engaging properly in their face-to-face lives.”
In that first meeting I went to for my sugar addiction, I heard others admit to doing the same things I did. Sneaking. Lying. Throwing food in the bin to halt a binge only to come back later and fish it out to eat.
It was right in front of my face but I couldn’t see it for what it was for years: Addiction is a wayward beast. Christ knows you can’t see much when you’re laid flat on your back, pinned down by invisible yet ferocious forces.
The narrative was just so unfamiliar that I doubted it was real. Where were the used syringes, grubby spoons, and Ewan McGregor swimming in a lav to Brian Eno music? Where were the gin and tequila bottles strewn next to stained ashtrays?
A glance into my dependence only revealed brightly colored plastic wrappers and packaging, crumbs strewn on the car floor, stomach pains, abominable flatulence, and soft velvety chocolate stains on the couch and seat of my pants. Far from Trainspotting or Leaving Las Vegas, this was more like Leaving Seven Eleven.
It was almost laughable, only it wasn’t, it was excruciating. I ate the way an alcoholic drinks and an addict uses. The notion that food could derail a person the way hard drugs or booze can sounds extreme. And whilst the destruction is not as ostensibly violent and as speedily lethal, my spirit was decaying.
When you’re enslaved by compulsion and obsession, no matter what the substance or behavior — you suffer. Your inner freedom withers away and you are caught in a most painful cycle.
I could not stop binge eating. And for some reason I never equated my lawless benders on sweet things as a bona fide addiction. Denial is blinding but it wasn’t only mine. I was seeking the help of health professionals — psychologists and health counselors — who were also missing the reality of the problem. They would say “But it’s not that bad, right?” and minimize my behavior in an attempt to make me feel better. But it was that bad, and their diminishing comments made me feel worse.
They were kind and well intentioned and approached the issue by trying to help me find moderation in my relationship with food, namely sugar: my white powdery blow. I’d find that balance for periods — sometimes days, weeks or even months — but I’d inevitably topple into blowout. And I’m not talking a couple of pieces of cake or a tub of ice cream.
There is a cultural denial around the legitimacy of sugar and food addiction and treatment for disordered eating is usually centered around balance. And that is the ideal solution. But what if that doesn’t work? What if the notion of moderation is the very thing that keeps some of us monumentally stuck?
My continual failure to eat “normally” left me bereft and berating myself for my inability to halt this self-abuse. I couldn’t implement what I was being advised to do. What in hell was wrong with me? I’ve never had a DUI for drunk driving, but I have shamefully dinged my car (and others) more than once as I scoffed food blindly from the passenger seat.
I’d swear off bingeing; writing and typing up resolutions only to rip them up or delete them when I’d inevitably slide into another spree.
Then one day the penny dropped when a health counselor I’d been working with for four years said, “I’ve got it…You’re addicted to sugar!” Well yeah…anyone could see that, but what was her point?
She told me I needed to treat it like a legitimate addiction, find a support group, and face the fact I couldn’t eat processed sugar in moderation, which meant not eating it. At all.
At all. The suggestion seemed not only cruel, but blatantly impossible. I didn’t know a single person who didn’t eat sugar. What a farcical idea. And yet I knew she spoke the truth so I went out and binged.
I googled and found a 12-step group for overeaters. Begrudgingly and only because she kept hassling me, I went as I was desperate and had begun to experience the onset of chronic pain and digestive problems: the inescapable physical consequences of treating my body like a garbage bin.
In that first meeting I listened to others talk about doing the same shameful things with food that I did. Sneaking. Lying. Throwing food in the bin to halt a binge only to come back later and fish it out to eat. Feeling as if your insides were going to erupt with fullness and being unable to stop stuffing your face.
Shame released its chokehold on me as I saw I wasn’t alone. And I was okay. I wasn’t a bad person even if I continued to binge. I was doing something that was bad for me, but I wasn’t bad. Self-loathing gave way to…well, it must’ve been grace, and I felt an ache for the girl in me who’d strained for so long under the weight of something much bigger than her.
For the first time in over 15 years, and at the age of 34 with three young children, I had the wherewithal to choose. Prior to that I hadn’t perceived the freedom of choice. I’d been ruled by compulsion. All I knew was I didn’t want to live out that painful cycle anymore.
So I surrendered to reality. And I kept going to meetings, connecting with others who had been or were struggling like me. Doubt would creep in at times as to whether this was the right path, but I kept going along that bumpy path, and somehow, one day at a time, I let go of my sweet poison.
And the inhumane fate of a life without sugar? It was revealed to be the very opposite and I began over time to experience a newfound freedom with food and in life.
Having long struggled with bouts of suicidal depression and anxiety, the improvement in my mental health was indisputable. Not only to me, but to those around me including my husband and mum. I knew my sugar habit was unravelling my life, but I had no concept as to how much my life could blossom when I became unstuck.
I’m not an advocate for demonizing sugar, or booze, or whatever substances or activities people indulge in for pleasure. The reality is many people can and do enjoy these things and I reckon that’s great.
But for me, I crossed a tipping point somewhere along the line where a chocolate brownie was no longer a single chocolate brownie that could be eaten and left at that; it opened up an insatiable craving for more, and with that came far more pain than joy.
I had given up all hope that I could ever find peace from this affliction. And ironically it was throwing in the towel in desperation that allowed me to succumb to the truth and seek the help I needed to change. Even when you think it doesn’t exist, there is always, always hope.
Have you faced food and/or sugar addiction? Tell us about it in the comments.
Researchers examined the ingredients in chocolate chip cookies to determine why they are so addictive for some.
Science has turned in a humdinger: studies indicate that sugar and sweetness can induce reward and craving that are comparable to those induced by cocaine.
Research giving laboratory rats rewards of sugars and sweets shows that these goodies can not only replace a drug, but can even surpass the drug in the rats’ preference.
CNN reports there are a variety of reasons for this powerful effect, including an emotional connection to good memories of baking. Kathleen King, founder of Tate’s Bake Shop in Southampton, New York, and maker of a top-rated chocolate chip cookie, shared with CNN, “If I’m celebrating, I can have a couple of cookies, but if I’m sad, I want 10 cookies. While the cookie is in your mouth, that moment is happiness—and then it’s gone, and you’re sad again, and you have another one.”
The study shows that at a neurobiological level, the qualities of sugar and sweet rewards are apparently stronger than those of cocaine. The study indicates evolutionary pressures in seeking foods high in sugar and calories as a possible reason for this.
In addition, according to CNN, chocolate contains trace amounts of the compound anandamide. Anandamide is also a brain chemical that targets the same cell receptors as THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. So there may be another chemical basis for the intense pleasure that many people get from a chocolate chip cookie.
This also explains the insane popularity of “marijuana brownies” which combines THC and the chemical hit of chocolate. These chewy treats are so beloved that guru Martha Stewart even has a recipe for pot brownies.
Salt is an important element to the chocolate chip cookie’s addictive quality.
“It is what adds interest to food, even if it’s a sweet food, because it makes the sugar and other ingredients taste better and come together better,” Gail Vance Civille, founder and president of Sensory Spectrum, told CNN. “A pinch of salt in cookies really makes a difference, and it enhances sweetness a little bit.”
Gary Wenk, director of neuroscience undergraduate programs at the Ohio State University and author of Your Brain on Food, notes that cookies high in fat and sugar will raise the level of anandamide in the brain regardless of what other ingredients are in the cookie.
“The fat and sugar combine to induce our addiction as much as does the anandamide,” Wenk told CNN. “It’s a triple play of delight.”
