Sugar addiction - Jinju

<Sugar Addiction>                                                    Jinju Eom

                               

Do you like sweet things? I like chocolates especially with Hazelnut. It is common sense that sugar is really addictive. There was an experiment that comparing the mice which addicted to sugar and cocaine. They chose not cocaine but sugar. Some results said that sugar has 8 times addictive than cocaine. There also exists a term, ‘sugar addiction’. Have you heard of this word?

Sugar addiction is the symptom that someone who cannot control the amount of sugary foods has. They also take sweet things frequently. If you want to take sweet things when you are stressed, you might be addicted to sugar. There is some lists to check whether you are addicted to sugar or not.

1. You have to eat sweet things when you stressed.

2. Even if you are full, you have to eat sweet things.

3. You cannot concentrate on something without sweets.

4. You are finding much sweeter things than sweets you take now.

5. You feel nervous without sweets.

Overeating sugar is dangerous because this causes bad results. First, it is highly related to the obesity. If you take much glucose from sugar, our body tries to save the rest of glucose, the energy so they are all accumulated in the form of fats. Second, according to saving energy process, after eating sugary things, our body releases lots of insulin to lower the blood sugar. Then one day this system could be out of work and we call it as diabetes. Third, it causes mental problem which is called ‘sugar blues’. When you are lack of sugar, you will feel depressed, and after take sugar you will feel better. If this cycle is rapidly repeated, then that can be harmful for our mental health. Fourth, sugar attacks our skin components such as collagen and elastin so it promotes aging of skin. Finally, sugar makes our immune system weaker and disturbs our body absorbing vitamins and minerals.

To prevent sugar addiction, you can alter the source of sweetness from white sugar to fruit sugar. Fruit sugar is not completely refined so our digestive system uses energy to break it. Also, you can release your stress by using another method such as exercising instead of finding sugar.  

Last year, WHO recommended introducing a special tax called ‘Sugar tax’. Some parts of United States and Europe decided to introduce that tax system and this is also quite controversial topic in Korea. No matter what they accept new tax system or not, this shows that it is important to reduce the amount of sugar we take.