Sugar is Said to be 8x More Addictive than Cocaine

“Better Health Begins At The Cell.” -Dr. Bill Cole

(If you have or suspect you might have thyroid related problems go to ColeClass.com and watch the short video (about 23 minutes) that I made for you. It’s free… You don’t even have to give me your email.)

Hey guys, today I want to talk about everyone’s favorite subject: Sugar.

I do consults with patients, a lot of patients, every month, and my existing patients have access to me via text, so we text a lot. What do you think is the number one question that I get? I would say maybe 95%, and that’s not exaggerating, I don’t think. 95% of the questions that I get from my patients are revolving around what? Sugar. Right?

They want to know: “Is this a good substitute?” “Is that a good substitute for sugar?” “What can I substitute for sugar?” They’re always showing me pictures of carby-type foods that they find at the health food store, or at the regular grocery store. They always ask me, “Is this acceptable?”

I always joke about it, and you’ve probably heard me say it. In my 30-some years, I’ve never had anyone come to me addicted to vegetables. The truth of the matter is, the sugar we consume is highly addictive. I was reading recently in certain people, it’s over 8X as addictive as cocaine in certain individuals.

I read another thing from Mark Hyman, who is a very well-respected medical doctor, head of the functional medicine department of Cleveland Clinic. Mark said that it’s interesting that cocaine and heroin activate one part of the pleasure part of the brain, but sugar lights the brain up like a pinball machine. That’s the reality, right? That it is a highly, highly addictive substance. People that don’t believe it need to try to get off of sugar and see what happens.

I had a lady in the other day, and I asked her a question I ask people all the time, “Do you feel addicted to sugar?” She said, “No. I’m not addicted to sugar.” Then I looked at her diet, and it’s a bagel or bread toast in the morning. It’s a sandwich in the afternoon, and pasta or potatoes in the evening. She’s not realizing that these things break down into sugar.

When I say “sugar,” I’m not just talking about sugar from the sugar jar, or sugar added to food. It’s foods that also break down into sugar. That feeds this whole addiction thing that we have. We’ve got to try to break that, because my personal experience is that it’s this over consumption of sugar driving insulin in the body that sets up this chronic inflammatory state.

It’s the beginning of heart disease. It’s the beginning of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, weight gain, all of the things that we see, and we might call it “metabolic syndrome”. It’s epidemic in our society, but believe me, its roots are in this constantly driving insulin up in our body because we are consuming too much sugar in our lives.

What I do, and I’ve showed you this before on my videos, but these are the two things that I use from my health food store. It’s from Honey Mama’s. She has a Lavender-Red Rose bar. The ingredients in it are coconut meat, dark cocoa, essence of lavender, red rose petals, and raw local honey. It’s really satisfying, for those of you that like chocolate. Then, I also recently just found another one. It’s a ginger-cardamom bar, which is coconut meat, dark cocoa, ginger oil, cardamom, and raw local honey. I haven’t tasted this one yet, but one of my patients says it’s really good. This is going to be a healthier alternative.

But if you’re highly inflamed, and you’re consuming this kind of stuff in excess, my experience is it’s still going to be difficult to get rid of the inflammation in your body. If sugar is one of the main drivers of inflammation in our body, we need to cut back. But this is certainly a nice transition for you, to go from unhealthy type of sugar products to something that’s definitely more whole food and healthy.

There’s another thing that I love. It’s called Hail Merry’s Dark Chocolate Tart. Maybe you could find that online. It’s at my local health food store. Really simple ingredients: organic maple syrup, dark cocoa, almond flour, organic virgin coconut oil, and sea salt. Right? It’s definitely a healthier alternative. No doubt about it. Whole food.

Then for those of you that are on the bread kick, right? You can’t do without your bread. We buy a Paleo Bread. We get it at our local health food store. I’m not sure if you can find it online, or if this is just a local product. I really don’t know.

But the thing that I love about it is that it has five grams of fiber per slice. Can you imagine that? When you take away the five grams of fiber off the six grams of carbs, you’re left with one net gram of carbs. That’s going to be a great transition for those of you trying to eliminate bread or reduce bread in your life, to reduce the inflammation.

I hope this helps you, guys. We’ve got to go the whole food route. But even still, because sugar is so addictive, and it’s driving so much of what we see health-wise today, or the lack of health today in our country, we need to try to eliminate these things.

Over time, believe it or not, I say about three to four weeks, you can start to break this sugar addiction. When you’re flooding your cells with real nutrients, and reducing inflammation, and able to get those nutrients and hormones into your cells, then you’ll start to see this unnatural desire go away.

It is an unnatural desire for sugar. Our ancestors did not have to deal with what we are dealing with. That’s because if you go back to our food pyramid, they recommended six to eleven servings of grains a day. Can you imagine that absurdity? I’ve touched on this in other videos before, but it keeps coming up when I talk about sugar.

It’s why we are where we are today. We have just become gluttonous when it comes to these type of foods. We’ve been told things like fat is bad for you, when in reality, it’s the over consumption of carbohydrates that has put us where we are. All of the empty carbohydrates, for sure.

Consuming good fats is one of the secrets. It’s one of the missing ingredients in the standard American life. Consuming good fats is what is necessary to help heal yourselves and break the sugar addiction. Also, getting rid of the bad fats, which is also inflammatory, and replacing them with good fats.

Hope this helps.

Take care, guys. God bless.