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Melissa Killeen

What’s so bad about flour and sugar? Flour and sugar are the two most common substances to which food addicts identify as being addicted to. Although some food addicts report addictions to fatty, salty and excess food volume, I am going to focus on flour and sugar in this post.

If you think you might be a food addict, then you need to know a lot more about what foods are the most likely to be addictive, even though you may not want to give them up. Most food addicts don’t want to give up flour or sugar; they just want to avoid the consequences of eating.

The simplest way is to find out if you are addicted to flour and/or sugar is to use the self-assessment provided by the Overeaters Anonymous on their website, Is OA for you? You can also check out the Food Addiction Institute’s self-assessment questions, Am I a food addict?

Phillip Werdell, from the Food Addiction Institute, suggests using an assessment of different kinds of “eaters,” if you are looking for a way to distinguish between a psychologically-based eating disorder and a food addiction. H. Teresa Wright, a registered dietitian from the Philadelphia area, with over a decade of experience working with compulsive eaters, suggests to her clients that they read two books: Geneen Roth’s Feeding the Hungry Heart, as a good read on emotional eating and Breaking Free of Compulsive Eating, a book focused on addictive eating. In addition, she suggests Kay Shepard’s Food Addiction: the Body Knows or Anne Katherine’s Anatomy of a Food Addiction.

Both Wright and Werdell suggest letting you decide what type of eater you are, so you can come to your own conclusions. If you try any of the self-assessments and you think you need to make major changes in the way you eat, my strong recommendation is to do this in consultation with a doctor, dietitian and/or therapist.

Sugar
Sugar is a carbohydrate. Perhaps we only use the white or brown stuff, but sugar is also a natural part of many other foodstuffs such as lactose, which is a sugar found in milk, maltose in grain, fructose in fruit, and sucrose, a refined sugar. Brown sugar is simply white sugar with a bit of molasses added or it is colored with caramel.

The food industry has developed enormous sidelines of “diet” foods, usually labeled “Sugar-Free.” Given the many different varieties of sugar; derivations of sugar such as Splenda; sugars formed from alcohol (not surprisingly, these can be very addictive); chemical sweeteners (the “polys”); artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, saccharine, etc., the label “Sugar-Free” usually means the food contains a different kind of sugar. For some food addicts, these non-sugars can have the same result as refined sugar—the inability to eat it in reasonable amounts. Although some artificial sweeteners have no caloric value, their impact on our bodies can be just as deadly as sugars with calories, if we cannot stop consuming it. A single can of soda contains 12 teaspoons of added sugar. That’s 120 percent of the USDA’s recommended daily intake of sugar. Just think how expertly the food industry has glamorized diet soda, and how powerfully addictive artificial sweeteners are when linked with caffeine.

What is bad about sugar is how it works in our body. Sugar is rapidly converted in the blood to triglycerides. Triglycerides are a type of fat (or sometimes called a lipid) in your blood, which can increase your risk of heart disease,obesity, and diabetes. Sugar is devoid of vitamins, minerals, or fiber; it is an empty food. Its main use in the food industry is as a stabilizer, flavor enhancer and an appetite stimulant.

Today, the per capita consumption of sugar and other highly refined sweeteners (such as high-fructose corn syrup) is 158 pounds a year. That is a 30 percent increase in the past four decades, and during the same time period, the number of overweight Americans increased by nearly 20 percent. The culprit? Sugar.

In 2005, researchers examined the effects of sugar on the immune system. A published study at the National Institute of Health documented sugar’s impact: Sugar steals the ability of white blood cells to destroy bacteria. White blood cells are known as “phagocytes,” and phagocytic tests show that a couple of teaspoons of sugar can sap their strength by 25 percent. A large helping of pie and ice cream renders your white cells 100 percent helpless. This effect lasts from 4 to 5 hours. Consider a 900 ml serving of processed and packaged orange juice or one 683 ml of cola—either of these will depress the immune system by 50 percent, 30 minutes after ingestion and this will last for hours! If you have sugar at every meal, which many do by eating processed foods, alone, your immune system is constantly impaired.

For food addicts, who binge on enormous amounts of sugar, eat meals consisting of large amounts of processed food, or diets consisting almost completely of convenience foods, the impact could be exponential. For us, to eat this way is to die.

Flour
Many food addicts are willing to give up sugar, but not flour. Paradoxically, it is because we believe that not having bread in our house, or never having a birthday cake makes us different. We fear appearing “different” when we already appear very ill with food addiction.

Flour has been embedded in so many foods, we may have more difficulty surrendering flour than the more obvious of the two, sugar. Unfortunately, the food industry is willing to subscribe to “gluten-free” advertising. It is considered a niche market and many food stores see catering to people with Celiac disease (a wheat allergy) and gluten allergies as a revenue boost. Some food addicts have these medical issues, but really what makes flour addictive is the issue of bioavailability.

Bioavailability defines the ease with which something is absorbed from the digestive tract. The higher the bioavailability of a food, the greater the total absorption and rate of absorption. The faster a food is absorbed, the more quickly it turns to glucose in the body, producing a jump in blood sugar.

Whole grains have been in the human diet for thousands of years. Milling, grinding and refining grains is a relatively recent endeavor. Unprocessed, whole grains take much longer to digest than refined flours, for example, hot oatmeal for breakfast is better than a slice of wheat toast. Many food addicts find that flours made from other grains are just as bioavailable. Rice flour is likely to trigger the same reaction in a food addict as rice syrup: both are highly refined. We may initially be persuaded by “faux foods,” e.g. “whole-grain bread,” “flour-free bread,” etc. The fact is that such breads are all made from refined grains. It is a matter of definition on a nutritional label. Reading the glycemic index of such foods tells us the truth about their composition.

The more refined a flour is, the more bioavailable it becomes. And the more quickly it turns into a spike of blood sugar followed by a drop in blood sugar. Which is the main reason we want to eat something at 10am and 3pm, when we are feeling lethargic and need a boost of energy.

Sugar and flour are both carbohydrates. Other high carbohydrate foods are fruit, sweet juices, ice cream, pies, candy, potatoes, flour tortillas, pasta, rice and beans.

So why am I addicted to flour and sugar? We will explore more of this in next week’s post.

Information and advice contained on this site should not be used for diagnosis or should not be used as a substitute for medical advice. Always consult your doctor or healthcare professional before beginning any new treatment.

Research for this post came from:

Food Addiction Institute
http://foodaddictioninstitute.org/fundamental-concepts/am-i-a-food-addict/2011/01/

Lawrence Wilson, MD
http://drlwilson.com/ARTICLES/ADRENAL_BURNOUT.htm

Dr Jeremy Kaslow, Allergy, Asthma, and Clinical Immunology and Internal Medicine
hhttp://www.drkaslow.com/html/oxidation_rates.html

Dr John Briffa- A Good Look at Good Health Blog
http://www.drbriffa.com/2012/05/17/wheat-opiate-of-the-masses/

Dr William Davis- The Wheat Belly Blog
http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/

Dr Joseph Alaimo, Alaimo Chiropractic- Blog
http://drjosephalaimo.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/caseomorphins-and-gluteomorphins-%E2%80%93-the-food-opiods/

This week’s guest blog is written by Heidi Grant Halvorson. Dr. Halvorson is a rising star in the field of motivational science. Heidi is the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School. She is a an expert blogger for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, as well as a regular contributor to the BBC World Service’s Business Daily, the Harvard Business Review, and SmartBrief’s SmartBlog on Leadership. Her writing has also been featured on CNN Living and Mamapedia. Her new book “Succeed: How We Can All Reach Our Goals”, and her Harvard Business Review ebook, “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently” are available on Amazon.
You can contact Heidi at heidi.grant.halvorson@gmail.com

Do you snack every night in front of the television? Do you drink a little too much when you are out with your friends? Do you ever find that you’ve smoked a whole pack of cigarettes, bitten off half your nails, or eaten an entire bag of Doritos without realizing you were doing it?

That’s the real problem when it comes to ridding yourself of bad habits – back in the beginning, when the behavior was new; it was something you did intentionally and probably consciously. But do anything enough times, and it becomes relatively automatic. In other words, you don’t even need to know that you are doing it.

In fact, as new research shows, you don’t even need to want to do it. If you develop the habit of snacking in front of your TV at night, how hungry you are or how tasty the snack is will no longer determine whether or how much you eat.

Many bad habits operate mindlessly, on autopilot. They are triggered by the context (e.g., watching TV, socializing, feeling stressed), rather than by any particular desire to engage in the behavior. So, the key to stopping a bad habit isn’t making a resolution – it’s figuring out how to turn off the autopilot. It’s learning to disrupt the behavior, preferably before it starts.

Take for example a recent study of Movie Theater popcorn-eating. Researchers invited a group of people to watch fifteen minutes of movie previews while seated in a real movie theater. They gave the participants free bags of popcorn, and varied whether the popcorn was fresh or stale. (The stale popcorn was actually a week old, yuck!) Then they measured how much popcorn each person ate.

Not surprisingly, everyone who got the stale popcorn reported liking it less than those who got fresh. And people with a weak popcorn habit (i.e., those who didn’t usually eat popcorn at the movies) ate significantly more fresh popcorn than stale. But here’s the kicker – for people with a strong popcorn habit (i.e., those who always ordered popcorn at the movies) it didn’t matter how stale the popcorn was! They ate the same amount, whether it was an hour old, or seven days old.

That’s worth thinking about for a moment – people with a strong habit were eating terrible popcorn, not because they didn’t notice it was terrible, but because it didn’t matter. The behavior was automatic, not intentional. So if tasting like Styrofoam won’t keep you from eating something, what will?

The researchers found that there were, in fact, two effective ways to disrupt the automatic popcorn-eating.

First, you can disrupt the habit by changing the context. When they conducted the same study in the context of a conference room, rather than a movie theater, people with strong popcorn habits at the movie theater stopped eating the stale popcorn. The automatic popcorn-eating behavior wasn’t activated, because the situational cues were changed.

If you have a habit you’d like to break, spend some time thinking about the situations in which it most often occurs. If you snack in front of the TV at night, consider doing something else in the evenings for a while – reading a good book, spending time with friends or family, even surfing the web. Any alternative activity that is less likely to trigger mindless eating. If you just can’t give up your favorite TV shows, you might try rearranging the room or sitting in a different chair – anything that alters the context can help.

Second, you can disrupt a habit by changing the method of performance. In another study, the researchers found that asking habitual popcorn eaters who were in a movie theater to eat with their non-dominant hand, stopped them from eating the stale popcorn, too.

So if you can’t change the situation, you can change the way the habit gets executed. If you mindlessly eat or smoke with your right hand, try using your left. If you mindlessly drink from the glass that the bartender keeps refilling, try sitting at a table instead of the bar, so you’ll have to consciously get up and ask for a refill. Making the behavior a little more difficult or awkward to perform can be a great way to throw a wrench in the works.

Too often, we blame our failures on the wrong things. When it comes to ridding ourselves of bad habits, we usually chalk our difficulties up to a lack of commitment or willpower. But as I’ve argued in my new book, “Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals”, conquering your behavioral demons needs to start with understanding how they really work and applying the most effective strategy. In this case, success comes from not making it quite so easy for your autopilot to run the show.

Tag Archives: binge eating

I am hungry — What’s wrong with flour and sugar?

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