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Sugar is not an addictive substance. You cannot become physiologically dependent on sugar with negative consequences. Lets not bring in even more disinformation

Sugar is not an addictive substance. You cannot become physiologically dependent on sugar with negative consequences. Lets not bring in even more disinformation. This nebulous application of the word "addiction" to non-addictive concepts by the public can lead to damaging outcomes like state DAs themselves exploiting the public ignorance and mis-use of the concept to try to bring themselves fame so they can run for public office later. See the original post topic for an example.

nonethewiser 3y ago
> Lets not bring in even more disinformation. And this is why “disinformation” is a bullshit term. Hes not spreading lies nor objective falsehoods. Hes not even making the claims you’re rebutting (physical addiction to sugar). He makes a perfectly valid point that we can all discuss as we see fit without maligning it as disinformation.
- superkuh 3y ago
  > Hes not even making the claims you’re rebutting (physical addiction to sugar). Did you not read his post? I'll quote it for you. > Would candy companies be liable for making their products appealing to kids, knowing sugar is an addictive substance?
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    You changed "addictive" to "physiologically addictive" to win an argument no one was having. That's not the only form of addiction recognized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Behavioral_addiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Behavioral_addiction Food addiction (particular sugary/fatty foods) isn't that insane of a concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Food_Addiction_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Food_Addiction_Scale
    - superkuh 3y ago
      Your link, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Behavioral_addiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Behavioral_addiction Now lets go through each of them cited in the bad wikipedia write up. Sexual addiction: Not in the DSMV or even the updated DSM-5-TR. Not in the ICD-10 or ICD-11 (pre-release). Gambling addiction: The only one grandfathered in to the DSM. It's in DSMV. Probably to be removed in later versions "The DSM-V has since reclassified pathological gambling as gambling disorder..." ref: https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10899-014-9449-2 https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10899-014-9449-2 . Also not in ICD-10 or ICD-11. Internet addiction: "Excessive Internet use has not been recognized as a disorder by the World Health Organization, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) or the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11)." "The American Psychiatric Association (APA), while stating there is insufficient evidence for the inclusion of Internet gaming disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013, considered it worthy of further study." And now lets go back to sugar and accepting your moving the goalposts to "food addiction" (another unsupported concept): You say that it is a purely psychological "addiction" with no physiological aspect and I agree. It's not an addiction. Those are called habits. Read more at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4179181/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4179181/ "Food Addiction in the Light of DSM-5" to understand how this societal fear meme fails to fulfill the requirements of an actual addition disorder.
      - mandmandam 3y ago
        This pedantry isn't appropriate. Sugar is addictive, in the sense that people understand the term: "It hacks your brain and makes you want more, despite it being real bad for you". That's millions of years of evolution at work. OP never claimed any of what you're straw-manning. Btw, the APA colluded to torture people [0]. That's not something a credible or reputable organization does. I know, they fired four people and said sorry - it's not enough. I don't care about their view on what addiction is in the slightest, and nor should any of us. 0 - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/almost-addicted/201507/how-psychologists-and-the-apa-colluded-in-torture https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/almost-addicted/2015...
      - jstarfish 3y ago
        The APA and DSM-V will be credible resources when anybody in the entire institution of psychiatry manages to reliably correct a single psychiatric disorder they've identified. CBT is just dog training applied to humans. Beyond that neat little trick they're just a pill-pushing standards committee. Where they don't succeed, or get taken for suckers too many times, they take to reclassifying disorders to pave over their failures. You don't need to have corrected multiple personality disorder or Munchausen syndrome when you can quietly rename them and obfuscate just how often you get it catastrophically wrong. When your failures end up committing suicide, they won't be testifying against you later. That they're denying excessive internet use outs them as either incompetent-- or complicit. FAANG hires psychologists to help in algorithm design to engineer these specific ends. You can't identify gambling addiction is a problem while your own people are the ones consulting on development of gambling algorithms. That would be unethical, and look very bad for you. #mentalhealthawareness! We won't acknowledge sex addiction as real, but we're totally qualified to treat it! Notice how doctors quietly stopped advocating for circumcision of all male infants. When we look at what they've been recommending for generations--and their rationalizations--it makes them look like savages ("They don't feel the pain! They don't remember the pain! Women prefer it! It prevents HIV, maybe! You don't speak English? No problem, just sign here."). They have no skin in the game (and now, neither do you) beyond adding an additional line item to mom's invoice. (I'm not anti-medicine, just disillusioned in how little these institutions ever acknowledge wrongdoing or complicity.)
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    That’s the quote. Which doesn’t say anything about being physically addictive. Guess you’re spreading disinformation.
daeros 3y ago
Certainly psychological addiction though does exist?
cbozeman 3y ago
Where'd you read that? A quick search through clinical literature reveals the following points: 1. Brain Chemistry and Sugar: Sugar activates the brain's reward system by releasing opioids and dopamine, similar to addictive substances. 2. Behavioral Similarities to Addiction: High sugar intake can lead to addictive-like behaviors, such as cravings, tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms. 3. Contrasting Views in Research: While sugar affects behavior similarly to addictive substances, it's debated whether this is due to physiological addiction or other factors like emotional dependencies. 4. Physical Effects and Overconsumption: Excessive sugar consumption is linked to health issues and may create a dependency cycle, but this is not universally accepted as clinical addiction. 5. Human vs. Animal Studies: Evidence for sugar addiction largely comes from animal studies, and translating these findings to human behavior is complex due to multifaceted influences on eating habits. The real answer here is: You don't know. You don't know because clinicians and researchers don't know, so if they don't know, you damn sure don't.
cosmojg 3y ago
Anything can be addictive. If anything, broader use of the term would serve to disarm it, not strengthen it, and that's a good thing given how poorly the law handles addiction and addictive substances. I understand dependence as requiring something to feel "normal" for whatever definition of "normal" an individual has. By this definition, I am addicted to and dependent on food, sleep, caffeine, medication, socializing, novelty, and reading. I find that I have a hard time doing less of these things, and sometimes these things get in the way of my ability to do other, healthier, more productive things. For some of these things, doing less of them would directly harm my physical health. With this in mind, I have met many for whom sugar is an addictive substance far more deleterious to their health than even cocaine is, for example, to others I know. They've struggled with problems like diabetes and obesity, and they've even lost jobs because of their relationship with sugar. Moreover, some of them respond aggressively and defensively, much like any other addict, when friends and family try to raise the issue with them, and some of them have tried and failed to give up sugar countless times, again like anyone else struggling with addiction. Earlier this year, I lost my mom to diabetic coma, in part, because she couldn't stop herself from eating candy and cookies all the time. She tried to stop, but she couldn't kick the habit of having a "dessert" before bed followed by the insulin necessary to control her blood sugar. It was her way of calming herself down enough to fall asleep at night. Eventually, she accidentally took too much, and no one found her until morning, long after hypoglycemia had destroyed most of her brain. She died of overdose like any other addict, although the thing she overdosed on, exogenous insulin, was a sort of secondary dependency caused by her primary dependency on sugar. The medical staff at the hospital insisted on steering me away from this terminology when discussing what happened, but their reasons were politics and marketing, not anything truly descriptive or scientific. Their fear was similar to yours in that they worried that patients might refuse insulin treatment if it was at all associated with the labels of "addiction" and "dependence." I can't help but think that she might still be around if her physician had treated her relationship with sugar more seriously or if they had more thoroughly warned her about the dangers of exogenous insulin in the context of addiction and dependence. After all, the use of exogenous insulin leads to the downregulation of insulin receptors causing "true" physiological dependence by way of a mechanism very similar to that of benzodiazepines, opioids, and alcohol. The same could be said for sugar in its role as a causal factor of diabetes itself.

nonethewiser 3y ago

> Lets not bring in even more disinformation. And this is why “disinformation” is a bullshit term. Hes not spreading lies nor objective falsehoods. Hes not even making the claims you’re rebutting (physical addiction to sugar). He makes a perfectly valid point that we can all discuss as we see fit without maligning it as disinformation.

superkuh 3y ago
> Hes not even making the claims you’re rebutting (physical addiction to sugar). Did you not read his post? I'll quote it for you. > Would candy companies be liable for making their products appealing to kids, knowing sugar is an addictive substance?
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  You changed "addictive" to "physiologically addictive" to win an argument no one was having. That's not the only form of addiction recognized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Behavioral_addiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Behavioral_addiction Food addiction (particular sugary/fatty foods) isn't that insane of a concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Food_Addiction_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Food_Addiction_Scale
  - superkuh 3y ago
    Your link, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Behavioral_addiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction#Behavioral_addiction Now lets go through each of them cited in the bad wikipedia write up. Sexual addiction: Not in the DSMV or even the updated DSM-5-TR. Not in the ICD-10 or ICD-11 (pre-release). Gambling addiction: The only one grandfathered in to the DSM. It's in DSMV. Probably to be removed in later versions "The DSM-V has since reclassified pathological gambling as gambling disorder..." ref: https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10899-014-9449-2 https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs10899-014-9449-2 . Also not in ICD-10 or ICD-11. Internet addiction: "Excessive Internet use has not been recognized as a disorder by the World Health Organization, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) or the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11)." "The American Psychiatric Association (APA), while stating there is insufficient evidence for the inclusion of Internet gaming disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013, considered it worthy of further study." And now lets go back to sugar and accepting your moving the goalposts to "food addiction" (another unsupported concept): You say that it is a purely psychological "addiction" with no physiological aspect and I agree. It's not an addiction. Those are called habits. Read more at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4179181/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4179181/ "Food Addiction in the Light of DSM-5" to understand how this societal fear meme fails to fulfill the requirements of an actual addition disorder.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      This pedantry isn't appropriate. Sugar is addictive, in the sense that people understand the term: "It hacks your brain and makes you want more, despite it being real bad for you". That's millions of years of evolution at work. OP never claimed any of what you're straw-manning. Btw, the APA colluded to torture people [0]. That's not something a credible or reputable organization does. I know, they fired four people and said sorry - it's not enough. I don't care about their view on what addiction is in the slightest, and nor should any of us. 0 - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/almost-addicted/201507/how-psychologists-and-the-apa-colluded-in-torture https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/almost-addicted/2015...
    - jstarfish 3y ago
      The APA and DSM-V will be credible resources when anybody in the entire institution of psychiatry manages to reliably correct a single psychiatric disorder they've identified. CBT is just dog training applied to humans. Beyond that neat little trick they're just a pill-pushing standards committee. Where they don't succeed, or get taken for suckers too many times, they take to reclassifying disorders to pave over their failures. You don't need to have corrected multiple personality disorder or Munchausen syndrome when you can quietly rename them and obfuscate just how often you get it catastrophically wrong. When your failures end up committing suicide, they won't be testifying against you later. That they're denying excessive internet use outs them as either incompetent-- or complicit. FAANG hires psychologists to help in algorithm design to engineer these specific ends. You can't identify gambling addiction is a problem while your own people are the ones consulting on development of gambling algorithms. That would be unethical, and look very bad for you. #mentalhealthawareness! We won't acknowledge sex addiction as real, but we're totally qualified to treat it! Notice how doctors quietly stopped advocating for circumcision of all male infants. When we look at what they've been recommending for generations--and their rationalizations--it makes them look like savages ("They don't feel the pain! They don't remember the pain! Women prefer it! It prevents HIV, maybe! You don't speak English? No problem, just sign here."). They have no skin in the game (and now, neither do you) beyond adding an additional line item to mom's invoice. (I'm not anti-medicine, just disillusioned in how little these institutions ever acknowledge wrongdoing or complicity.)
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  That’s the quote. Which doesn’t say anything about being physically addictive. Guess you’re spreading disinformation.

daeros 3y ago

Certainly psychological addiction though does exist?

cbozeman 3y ago

Where'd you read that? A quick search through clinical literature reveals the following points: 1. Brain Chemistry and Sugar: Sugar activates the brain's reward system by releasing opioids and dopamine, similar to addictive substances. 2. Behavioral Similarities to Addiction: High sugar intake can lead to addictive-like behaviors, such as cravings, tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms. 3. Contrasting Views in Research: While sugar affects behavior similarly to addictive substances, it's debated whether this is due to physiological addiction or other factors like emotional dependencies. 4. Physical Effects and Overconsumption: Excessive sugar consumption is linked to health issues and may create a dependency cycle, but this is not universally accepted as clinical addiction. 5. Human vs. Animal Studies: Evidence for sugar addiction largely comes from animal studies, and translating these findings to human behavior is complex due to multifaceted influences on eating habits. The real answer here is: You don't know. You don't know because clinicians and researchers don't know, so if they don't know, you damn sure don't.

cosmojg 3y ago

Anything can be addictive. If anything, broader use of the term would serve to disarm it, not strengthen it, and that's a good thing given how poorly the law handles addiction and addictive substances. I understand dependence as requiring something to feel "normal" for whatever definition of "normal" an individual has. By this definition, I am addicted to and dependent on food, sleep, caffeine, medication, socializing, novelty, and reading. I find that I have a hard time doing less of these things, and sometimes these things get in the way of my ability to do other, healthier, more productive things. For some of these things, doing less of them would directly harm my physical health. With this in mind, I have met many for whom sugar is an addictive substance far more deleterious to their health than even cocaine is, for example, to others I know. They've struggled with problems like diabetes and obesity, and they've even lost jobs because of their relationship with sugar. Moreover, some of them respond aggressively and defensively, much like any other addict, when friends and family try to raise the issue with them, and some of them have tried and failed to give up sugar countless times, again like anyone else struggling with addiction. Earlier this year, I lost my mom to diabetic coma, in part, because she couldn't stop herself from eating candy and cookies all the time. She tried to stop, but she couldn't kick the habit of having a "dessert" before bed followed by the insulin necessary to control her blood sugar. It was her way of calming herself down enough to fall asleep at night. Eventually, she accidentally took too much, and no one found her until morning, long after hypoglycemia had destroyed most of her brain. She died of overdose like any other addict, although the thing she overdosed on, exogenous insulin, was a sort of secondary dependency caused by her primary dependency on sugar. The medical staff at the hospital insisted on steering me away from this terminology when discussing what happened, but their reasons were politics and marketing, not anything truly descriptive or scientific. Their fear was similar to yours in that they worried that patients might refuse insulin treatment if it was at all associated with the labels of "addiction" and "dependence." I can't help but think that she might still be around if her physician had treated her relationship with sugar more seriously or if they had more thoroughly warned her about the dangers of exogenous insulin in the context of addiction and dependence. After all, the use of exogenous insulin leads to the downregulation of insulin receptors causing "true" physiological dependence by way of a mechanism very similar to that of benzodiazepines, opioids, and alcohol. The same could be said for sugar in its role as a causal factor of diabetes itself.