How sugar affects the brain - Nicole Avena

Picture warm, gooey cookies,

crunchy candies, velvety cakes,

waffle cones piled high with ice cream.

Is your mouth watering?

Are you craving dessert?

Why?

What happens in the brain that makes sugary foods so hard to resist?

Sugar is a general term used to describe a class of molecules

called carbohydrates,

and it's found in a wide variety of food and drink.

Just check the labels on sweet products you buy.

Glucose, fructose, sucrose,

maltose, lactose, dextrose, and starch

are all forms of sugar.

So are high-fructose corn syrup,

fruit juice, raw sugar, and honey.

And sugar isn't just in candies and desserts,

it's also added to tomato sauce,

yogurt, dried fruit, flavored waters, or granola bars.

Since sugar is everywhere, it's important to understand

how it affects the brain.

What happens when sugar hits your tongue?

And does eating a little bit of sugar make you crave more?

You take a bite of cereal.

The sugars it contains activate the sweet-taste receptors,

part of the taste buds on the tongue.

These receptors send a signal up to the brain stem,

and from there, it forks off into many areas of the forebrain,

one of which is the cerebral cortex.

Different sections of the cerebral cortex process different tastes:

bitter, salty, umami,

and, in our case, sweet.

From here, the signal activates the brain's reward system.

This reward system is a series of electrical and chemical pathways

across several different regions of the brain.

It's a complicated network,

but it helps answer a single, subconscious question:

should I do that again?

That warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you taste Grandma's chocolate cake?