renee.t.edge As a teacher my least favorite times of the year were the days after Halloween when the students were eating candy all day long. When I was first teaching I asked my principal if I could offer to trade my students bonus points into their grade for some of their candy which I would then use as random rewards throughout the year. While the kids always gave me the pieces they liked least, it would at least make a dent in their supply. It might cut it down from 5 days of nonstop candy consumption and hundreds of wrappers in my trash to 3 days of sugary disasters. Yet, it was three days of poor impulse control, speaking without thinking, crankiness, anger, anxiety, depression, and a very frustrating inability to remember anything I was teaching them.
Most often the assumption is that all of the sugar causes hyperactivity in children. It is the hyperactvity that then causes the inattention and other behavioral issues. However, In 1995, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a meta-analysis that reviewed the findings of 23 experiments across 16 scientific papers.
The authors only included studies that had used a a research method known as double-blind, where neither the children, the parents, or the teacher knew which child had received the sugar and which had received the placebo.
Following their analasys of the data the researchers concluded “This meta-analysis of the reported studies to date found that sugar (mainly sucrose) does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children.”
So is it all in your mind tht sugar seems to change the behavior of your child (or yourself!)? Let’s explore the effect that sugar has on the body.
Glucose is the simplest form of sugar, and all carbohydrates are broken down into glucose in your body. As a point of reference, your brain is about 2% of your body weight but uses about 20% of the glucose your body takes in each day. Your brain needs about 120 grams of glucose per days to meet its energy needs. Your brain lacks fuel stores, and as a result needs a continuous supply of glucose. This would make it seem like a good idea to be snacking on sugary treats all day long…Wouldn’t I just be giving my brain what it needs?
Did you know sweet is the key?
- Sugary foods are excellent sources of energy, so we have evolved to find sweet foods particularly pleasurable.
- To maximize our survival as a species, we have an innate brain system that makes us like sweet foods since they’re a great source of energy to fuel our bodies.
- Dopamine is a brain chemical released by neurons and can signal that an event was positive.
- Dopamine can lead to feelings of euphoria, bliss, and enhanced motivation and concentration.
- Sweet foods trigger the release of dopamine.
So how does the body respond to all of that candy?
How does this really impact the brain?
- A network of inhibitory neurons is critical for controlling behavior. These neurons are concentrated in the pre-frontal coretex, a key area of the brain involved in decision-making, impulse control and delaying gratification.
- Eating high-sugar diets can alter the inhibatory neurons. This makes you less able to control behavior and make decisions.
- The hippocampus is also affected. The sugar-induced changes in the hippocampus are both a reduction of newborn neurons which are vital for encoding memories, and an increase in chemicals linked to inflammation.
- The most common symptoms of brain inflammation is brain fog, anxiety, depression, irritability, anger, memory loss, and fatigue.
