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Just how bad is sugar? The truth is bittersweet.
“The extreme intensity of reward and craving produced by addictive drugs, like cocaine, largely explains, together with their toxic effects, why these drugs tend to be universally prohibited… ” So begins the conclusion paragraph of a paper published in 2013 under the title,
Sugar addiction: pushing the drug-sugar analogy to the limit.
“There is now strong evidence supporting the notion that hyperpalatable foods, notably those high in added sugar, can induce reward and craving that are at least comparable to addictive drugs.
“Although more research in humans is clearly needed to confirm this conclusion, there is now solid evidence in nonhuman animals showing that sugar and sweet reward can even be more rewarding and attractive than addictive drugs, probably owing to an underlying robust neural substrate. Such biological robustness may be sufficient to explain why people can have difficulty to control the consump