For over 25 years, I’ve struggled with addiction. Not to alcohol, drugs, or sex — but to plain old sugar. Despite the seemingly endless list of ‘isms’ in circulation, ‘sugarholism’ is yet to be recognised as a term in common psychological and medical parlance, although my lived experience is that the same mental strategies of compulsion and self-deception apply: “I don’t have a problem’, ‘I’ll just have one’ or ‘I’ll give up tomorrow’.
I know that sugarholics live among us because I am one. My issues are specific to refined sugar — without it, I have control. With it, I deceive myself into believing the impulse is in control and then berate myself the second it’s been swallowed…. before reaching for more.
The impact of something so satisfyingly harmful as sugar living in plain sight at every shop checkout and vending machine across the land, impregnating almost every consumable in our coffee-shop culture, puts people in harm’s way as part of their daily life. So, why is it not given the same platform as other addictions?
After almost 49 years of ingesting it, the challenge on a personal level is that the physical toll feels like it’s starting to be paid…. I can feel my body is quietly suffering at the cost of my mind’s inability to temper intake, and the effects are felt socially, familially, and biologically in equal measure.
So what’s behind the compulsion?
The route to understanding why sugarholism isn’t yet recognised isn’t straightforward. There seem to be several different phrases that compete for the same space, though sugarholism is the least cited, informal expression; not a clinical diagnosis:
Sugar addiction is a debated scientific concept but not a recognised standalone diagnosis.
Food addiction is a research concept studied using addiction-like behavioural criteria, again, not a standalone diagnosis in the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’, seen as the gold standard in the West for benchmarking diagnosis.
Binge-eating disorder is a recognised clinical diagnosis involving recurrent binge eating and associated distress, with compulsive eating a further descriptive term for persistent, difficult-to-control eating behaviour. But none of these are described in the same terms as the ‘holic’.
Researchers have investigated whether sugar can produce addiction-like effects. However, much of the strongest evidence comes from animal studies, particularly experiments involving intermittent access to sugar.
Human evidence appears less conclusive. It is difficult to separate the effects of sugar itself from those of highly palatable foods, which often combine sugar, fat, salt, and other rewarding characteristics.
In their paper ‘Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Intermittent, Excessive Sugar Intake’ published in ‘Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2008’, Nicole Avena, Pedro Rada and Bartley Hoebel investigated whether repeated sugar consumption could produce addiction-like effects in rats.
The researchers found that rats given intermittent access to sugar developed patterns of excessive consumption, alongside changes in brain reward pathways involving dopamine and opioid systems. They also observed behaviours resembling craving and withdrawal under certain experimental conditions, suggesting that repeated sugar consumption could produce some characteristics associated with addictive substances.
The authors concluded that sugar could produce addiction-like behavioural and neurochemical changes, particularly when consumed excessively and intermittently.
However, the study was conducted in animals, so its findings do not establish that sugar is addictive in humans.
The research nevertheless provides evidence that sugar consumption can influence brain reward mechanisms and supports further investigation into the possibility of addiction-like eating behaviours.
Sugar and alcohol have one important thing in common: both can activate the brain’s reward systems and encourage repeated consumption. But they behave very differently in the body, and the evidence that alcohol is addictive in humans is considerably stronger than the evidence for sugar addiction.
Alcohol directly alters brain function, impairs judgement and coordination, and can cause physical dependence and potentially life-threatening withdrawal. Sugar, on the other hand, provides energy and stimulates reward pathways, but there is insufficient evidence that sugar itself produces the same addictive effects in humans. So why does it appear to be so difficult for some people to regulate their intake of it? Why can one person eat a biscuit and happily stop, while another feels compelled to finish the packet and starts thinking about the next sweet thing almost immediately?
There are several possible explanations, and they seem to reinforce one another.
When you eat something sweet, your brain processes the taste as a potentially rewarding experience. This involves several interconnected systems, including those that use dopamine.
Dopamine is often described as the brain’s pleasure chemical, but that’s an oversimplification. It plays an important role in motivation, learning, and anticipating rewards. Repeatedly eating a particular food can strengthen the association between that food and the reward you experience.
In The Role of Brain Dopamine in Food Reward and Reinforcement (2006), R.A Wise examined how dopamine contributes to food reinforcement, food-seeking and the formation of learned preferences and habits. It describes how sensory cues associated with food — including its appearance, smell and taste — can acquire motivational significance through previous experiences.
For example, if eating a particular biscuit repeatedly produces a rewarding experience, the sight or smell of that biscuit may subsequently encourage you to seek it out. This doesn’t help at the petrol station checkout….
The important point seems to be that the brain can learn to associate environmental cues with rewards, making the cues themselves capable of motivating behaviour:
- You eat chocolate and find it enjoyable.
- Your brain learns that chocolate is rewarding.
- Seeing chocolate or feeling stressed can trigger an urge to eat it.
- Eating it reinforces the association, and so on.
Over time, the anticipation of eating something sweet can itself become a powerful motivator. For someone like me, who often feels like something sweet is a reward, it’s most likely a way to manage cortisol, stress, and the daily churn of professional and familial life. Frankly, in my household growing up, sugary snacks were a substitute for affection, verbalisation of love, and used to pass the time during a rather reserved and isolating childhood.
I can look back now and see the idea of reward becoming a vicious circle — that I believe I deserve it, I have it and enjoy it — and then am almost immediately disappointed in myself for knowing that it’s maintaining me as an overweight, midlifer — storing up cardiovascular risks and fending off a biological threat in Type 2 Diabetes that runs in my family.
But this is clearly not unique to sugar. Similar learning mechanisms operate with alcohol, gambling, social rewards, and many other pleasurable experiences.
The important distinction is that activating the brain’s reward system does not, by itself, establish addiction.
Taken together, the wide variety of studies available online seem to support three propositions:
- Dopamine contributes to motivation — helping energise behaviours directed towards rewarding outcomes.
- The brain learns from rewarding experiences where food and the circumstances surrounding its consumption can become associated with rewards.
- Food-related cues can subsequently trigger motivation. Seeing, smelling, or anticipating a familiar food can encourage someone to seek it out. The problem for someone like me is trying to buy petrol but coming out with something made by Cadbury.
These mechanisms are well established in reward neuroscience, although the precise contributions of different brain systems remain an active research area.
So, taking all of this in mind, what would it take to distinguish sugar as just being a reward centre stimulant, massaging dopamine, as opposed to a substance that can cause a genuine addiction?
The answer to it being seen as akin to alcoholism could therefore lie in tests in humans being undertaken in the same space as their squeaky four-legged counterparts with tails. Suppose researchers gave one group of participants sugar and another group a comparison food matched for sweetness, calories, and palatability. Surely, they could then investigate whether repeated sugar consumption produced a progressively stronger motivation to obtain sugar. They could look for patterns, like:
- How much effort participants are willing to expend to obtain it.
- Whether they continue seeking it when access becomes inconvenient.
- Whether cues associated with sugar trigger unusually strong urges.
- Whether these effects persist after the original reward has diminished.
The strongest evidence would need to be somewhere around persistent, disproportionate motivation accompanied by impaired control. To me, that feels to be the space where my perception of sugarholism resides. It’s the persistent impaired control, the inability to resist even against my own counterbalancing mental narrative.
Having grown up in a household with an alcoholic parent, the strategies and demands of sugar on the reward system feel all too familiar (no pun intended) and closely matched — particularly the love/hate relationship with the substance, the secretive consumption and the impact on physical health. Alongside my own father’s alcoholism was a tendency to overconsume sugar. Bassett’s Licorice Allsorts being a particular favourite of his and mine… He died in his sleep at 61.
I believe a word can describe an experience before science has established whether that experience constitutes a distinct medical condition. Sugarholism is a powerful example of this.
The phrase communicates a common experience for some of feeling compelled to consume sugar whilst having to tolerate the consequences on mental and physical wellness, but it does not establish the biological mechanism responsible or prove that sugar causes addiction. It’s a feeling that, for some, is very real.
Sugar is a sinister ingredient. Unlike alcohol, it rarely ever appears on its own and permeates every type of commonly available foodstuff. From childhood onwards, we normalise it as a means of celebration, reward, shared social experience, and poor regulation does as much damage as any other stimulant when consumed in excess.
Most noticeably, it’s cheap, abundant and profitable. That’s probably the main reason it’s not as well studied for its addictive effects in the same way alcohol and nicotine have been.
If we’re still not yet in a position to consider the term from a scientific perspective, I would distinguish between sugarholism as a description of behaviour and sugar addiction as a scientific hypothesis.
In my view, the first can be meaningful without the second having been established, and those of us who feel the draw of sugar consuming us as much as we consume it can comfortably associate the mental entrapment of sugar consumption to the same degree as someone dealing with compulsive participation in sex, drugs and rock and roll.
For now, I’m happy to affirm my own belief in the emotive importance of sugarholism as an emotional concept that quickly shares a state of compulsive behaviour.
Hi, I’m Andy, and I’m a practicing sugarholic.
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