Everything You Need To Know About Sugar And Its Effects On Your Mental Health

May 04, 2018 by apost team

It's no secret that sugar is the worst food you can put in your body. It has no caloric or health benefits, it's highly addictive, and the negative impacts sugar has on your health are innumerable. 

While you shouldn't have to swear off sugar forever, chances are you're indulging in it too much and it's severely damaging your health.

It doesn't help that many packaged products have loads of sugar hidden in them. How else would they make their food so addicting? In fact, almost 75% of products at the store contain sugar. While the World Health Organization caps the daily caloric intake of sugar at 5%, most of us eat at least 13% of our calories from some form of sugar.

Sugar impacts much more than your physical health. Here's what your brain looks like on sugar.

Sugar, much like cocaine, overstimulates our pleasure receptors and gives us a high. We even call a big intake of sweet foods a sugar high. The best way to enjoy your indulgences is by having a small piece of dark chocolate rich in antioxidants.

However, if you are slamming your receptors with sugar again and again, you'll require more doses of sugar to get that high feeling. This leads to a real addiction that traps you in a vicious cycle of unhappiness, obesity, and tons of other health dangers.

One study found that sugar actually changes the composition of our brains. Obese children's brains lit up differently than healthy children when they ate sugar. The networking in their brain is now wired to motivate them for food rewards. This chemical composition sets them up for a lifetime of sugar addiction and health problems.

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A study on rats found that sugar impairs learning and memory skills by actually slowing down the brain. Insulin is an important hormone that helps your body regulate healthy blood sugar levels and helps your brain cells function. Too much sugar weakens the synapses our brains need to communicate and operate.

There could be many factors as to why the number of diagnoses of depression and anxiety is steadily rising, but sugar could be a big contributor. When our brains come down from a sugar high, we could struggle with feelings of depression, anxiousness, irritability, mood swings, brain fog, and tiredness to name a few. Simply put, sugar wreaks havoc on our emotional wellbeing.

Lots of research points to the typical American diet full of processed foods loaded with sugar, fat, and salt increases your risk factors for tons of health problems, depression and anxiety included.

Alzheimer's has recently been called Type 3 diabetes. Chronic consumption of sugar leads to brain inflammation, which greatly increases your risk of developing a devastating age-related brain disorder.

Were you aware of how bad sugar was for your brain? Make sure all your sweet-tooth friends know the risks!

Our content is created to the best of our knowledge, yet it is of general nature and cannot in any way substitute an individual consultation with your doctor. Your health is important to us!