Steps to Break Your Sugar Addiction

Most of us are aware that sugar is not the best substance to load into our body, but many of us struggle with breaking free from it - many of us are even addicted to it.

In fact, one study found that a greater neurological reward was provided by intense sweetness than by cocaine. Similar findings are also made when we look at withdrawal from sweetness as well, indicating that weaning off sugar may cause the same neurological symptoms as withdrawing from alcohol, nicotine, and morphine. Additionally, we all face the reality that sugar is readily available in our food as a cheap fix for our cravings, 24 hours a day, in thousands of different venues and forms. Furthermore, we often use sugar as a reward and it’s the main food substance during celebrations.
So, given these studies and the vast availability of sugar, is there any hope for us? Can we really break free from the chains of our sugar addiction? The answer is yes, and it doesn’t include admitting yourself to a rehab facility for six weeks. The start of your sugarless healing can come in the shape of seven easy steps:
1: Don’t replace real sugar with artificial sugar
In an attempt to provide us all with the sweetness we crave without the excess calories we dread, companies created artificial sweeteners. The first, saccharin, was discovered in the 1870s by a scientist.
He wasn’t actually trying to come up with a way to sweeten our foods, he was working on coal tar derivatives and some white substance spilled onto his hand. Later that evening, when he was eating dinner, some of the substances transferred to a roll, making it exceptionally sweet.  After this fateful contamination, the world of food has never been the same.
Artificial sweeteners have been blamed for a lot of things that ail us – but more recently, their effect on our ability to lose weight has come into focus. As it turns out, a lack of calories doesn’t always mean a lack of consequences. A study back in 2013 found that artificial sweeteners can actually alter the way the body metabolizes sugar.
A 2008 study found that rats which were given artificial sweeteners ate more calories throughout the day and gained weight as a result. The researchers carrying out this study found that the ingestion of artificial sweeteners essentially caused confusion between the gut and the brain. The author of the study stated that, “sweet foods provide a salient orosensory stimulus that strongly predicts someone is about to take in a lot of calories. Ingestive and digestive reflexes gear up for that intake but when false sweetness isn’t followed by a lot of calories, the system gets confused. Thus, people may eat more or expend less energy than they otherwise would.”
While these studies give incentive from a weight loss approach to kick the fake sugar habit, it’s what artificial sweeteners are doing to your sugar-laden diet that is most concerning for a sugar addict. Why? Studies show that replacing regular sugar with artificial sweeteners is like kicking your cigarette habit by switching to cigars. You’re still getting the sweetness you crave, so you’re not really taking away that sweet taste which is damaging your health.
If you stick to a no-sugar plan, your cravings for sweetness will eventually stop.

2: Start an exercise regimen and add milk to your diet

Eating a lot of sugar has been shown to enhance reward mechanisms in the brain, thus making it hard to break the habit. For example, rats that were given sucrose wanted more of it and self-fed with it if it was available in their cage. This really is no different to an individual who keeps candy bars and cookies in their home or office desk.  If it’s there, and you have a preference for it, there’s a good chance that you’ll eat it, and you’ll probably feel pretty good after eating it – until you crash and need more. But what if you could replicate these feel-good effects through other foods?
Well, one study, for example, found that consumption of whey protein (a major protein found in milk) increased serotonin (a feel-good hormone that is associated with mood elevation). Other studies have found a link between exercise and increased serotonin production.

3. Say “no” to fat-free products

Here’s the low down on fat-free foods. Fat gets removed and sugar gets added. This is because manufacturers are selling you on the fact that the product is fat-free, not sugar-free. Major culprits include fat-free salad dressing, cookies, cakes, muffins and peanut butter.
The solution to this? Buy full-fat salad dressings and peanut butter. The monounsaturated fats in them will actually help to increase your overall sense of satisfaction.

4: Improve your sleep habits

A 2013 study found that our circadian sleep cycles have a whole lot more to do with when we reach for a sugary snack late at night. Another study found that when individuals were sleep-deprived, their reward activation centers in the brain were increased, thereby making it more difficult to say no to some candy. The bottom line is this – while diet and exercise help a lot with staying away from sweets, neither of them will be as effective if you don’t get enough sleep.

5: Keep snacks close by

One tactic that seems to work is to keep healthy snacks on hand. Therefore, when you have an urge for a sugary treat, you can distract yourself by taking a few mouthfuls of something healthy. Figure out what your trigger is and have something on hand to distract yourself. It could be an apple, a bag of healthy popcorn, or even string cheese.

6. Chew gum

A 2009 study found that individuals who chewed gum for at least three hours in the afternoon reduced their cravings for sweet snacks. While the study used a sugar-free gum variety, which contains artificial sweeteners, it nonetheless provides an interesting tactic to decrease your sweet cravings.

7: Never forget the benefit to your body

If you remain constantly aware of the damage that sugar is doing to your body, you should be able to convince yourself to stay away from it. Remain focused and never forget that decreasing your sugar intake has benefits well beyond the perfect body.

 

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Meditation `better pain reliever` than morphine

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You may want to get on the "Breathe in, breathe out" bandwagon as a team of boffins has suggested that meditation, a science-backed, no-prescription-needed way to reduce pain, is way better than taking morphine. 

The study conducted at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre in North Carolina suggests that just a few minutes of meditation each day could prove better pain relief than powerful drug medication.
The study showed that those individuals who had been taught to use relaxation and breathing techniques to cope with the pain had calmer brain scans. These people reported a 27 per cent reduction in pain intensity and 44 per cent less emotional pain.

Lead researcher Fadel Zeidan believes these findings prove that mindfulness meditation can produce different patterns of brain activity.

He said that based on the findings, they believe that as little as four 20-minute daily sessions of mindfulness meditation could enhance pain treatment in a clinical setting, adding "However, given that the present study examined healthy, pain-free volunteers, we cannot generalise our findings to chronic pain patients at this time."

The study is reported in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Bioengineered yeast used as opioids

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 Scientists have invented a speedy method to make potent painkilling opioids using bioengineered baker's yeast instead of poppies, but need to improve the process to make it commercially viable.

The new method, if it can be made more efficient, could greatly change the  medication manufacturing business, but there are concerns about increasing the growing problem of opioid abuse.

This same type of approach potentially also could be used to make other currently plant-based medicines for fighting cancer, infectious diseases and chronic illnesses.

The scientists said they altered the yeast's genetic make-up in a way that coaxed the cells to convert sugar into two opioids - hydrocodone and thebaine - in three to five days.

Hydrocodone, shuts down pain receptors in the brain, and related chemicals like morphine and oxycodone are part of a group of painkilling drugs called opioids produced from the opium poppy. Making opioids this way is faster than making opium from poppies, which can take more than a year.

This is an important development, as it may provide an alternative supply for these essential medicines and allow greater access for most of the global population that currently has insufficient access to pain medication.

The researchers are concerned about worsening the growing abuse of these painkillers by some, as now they can be produced faster than before.

Researchers  inserted DNA into the yeast that encodes instructions for the cells to make the enzymes necessary to perform the sugar conversion steps.

The baker's yeast was engineered with 23 genes from six different organisms: the brown rat, the goldthread herb, the California poppy, the Iranian poppy, the opium poppy and a soil bacterium called Pseudomonas putida.

The process unveiled by researchers shows proof that the bioengineered yeast can produce small amounts of opioid painkillers from scratch. Currently, about 4,400 gallons of bioengineered yeast would be needed to yield a single dose of the medication.

Researcher said the process needs to be improved to make it efficient enough for commercial production, saying this could take several years. But it is worth the wait for future patients, as surely it won't be addictive like opioids, hopefully.

Codeine can increase users' sensitivity to pain

 Using large and frequent doses of the common pain-killer codeine may actually produce heightened sensitivity to pain, without the same level of relief offered by morphine, according to a new research.

Researchers  have conducted what is believed to be the world's first experimental study comparing the pain relieving and pain worsening effects of both codeine and morphine.

The University's Professor , who is also a headache specialist , said codeine has been widely used as pain relief for more than 100 years but its effectiveness has not been tested in this way before.

"In the clinical setting, patients have complained that their headaches became worse after using regular codeine, not better," he said .

"Codeine use is not controlled in the same way as morphine, and as it is the most widely used strong pain reliever medication in the world, we thought it was about time we looked into how effective it really is," he said.

In laboratory studies, it was found that codeine provided much less pain relief than morphine, but resulted in the same level of increased sensitivity to pain.

"Pain sensitivity is a major issue for users of opioid drugs because the more you take, the more the drug can increase your sensitivity to pain, so you may never quite get the level of relief you need," he said.

 "In the long term it has the effect of worsening the problem rather than making it better. We think that this is a particular problem in headache patients, who seem more sensitive to this effect," he said.

"Both codeine and morphine are opioids but codeine is a kind of 'Trojan horse' drug ? 10 per cent of it is converted to morphine, which is how it helps to provide pain relief. However, despite not offering the same level of pain relief, we found that codeine increased pain sensitivity just as much as morphine," he said.

He said while more research is needed, these laboratory findings suggest a potential problem for anyone suffering from chronic pain who needs ongoing medication.

"People who take codeine every now and then should have nothing to worry about, but heavy and ongoing codeine use could be detrimental for those patients who have chronic pain and headache," he said.

"This can be a very difficult issue for many people experiencing pain, and it creates difficulties for clinicians who are trying to find strategies to improve people's pain," he said.

ps- this is only for information, always consult you physician before having any particular food/ medication/exercise/other remedies.

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How Morphine works

Scientists claim to have made a major discovery that could lead to more effective treatment of severe pain using morphine, an important pain relief drug. Use of morphine can lead to a range of side effects such as patients developing tolerance to it & increased sensitivity to pain. Until now, how this occurs has remained a mystery. Now the scientists have shown for the 1st time that opioid drugs like morphine activate an immune receptor in the brain to create an inflammatory response in the brain. They've also demonstrated how this brain immune receptor can be blocked, laying the ground-work for development of new therapeutic drugs that improve the effectiveness of morphine while reducing many of its problematic side effects.