A little girl in Seattle is capturing hearts all over the internet, thanks to her Jumbotron debut at a Mariners game. This is Beatrix Hart. The internet has quickly dubbed her Cotton Candy Girl, and this has turned her into a meme. Because I was being silly with my cotton candy. Beatrix's parents say it wasn't a sugar rush, the three year old just loves making faces. She loves her cotton candy! You're telling me that this isn't the face of a sugar rush, Mom and Dad? Well, you'd be telling me rig
ht. Sugar rushes are a complete and utter lie. And today, we're putting this long-standing food myth to bed. Hello, internet! Welcome to Food Theory, the show that has a sweet tooth for the sweet truth. Friends, October is upon us. It is spooky season. It's the month of costumes, horror, and above all, candy. Lots and lots of candy. But as you get older, the season's less about TPing the house of that one neighbor that gives away healthy apples and toothbrushes during trick-or-treating and more
about dreading your five-year-old bouncing off the walls after consuming half their body weight in Kit Kats. We've all seen it. Heck, plenty of us have experienced it ourselves. Except the idea of a sugar rush? It's all a lie. It's one of the greatest, most widely perpetuated pieces of misinformation in all of food-dom. And it was all designed to sell a book. So this Halloween, prepare to eat half your body weight in chocolate bars and Sour Patch Kids guilt free because today we candy crush the
sugar rush. Sugar making you hyper is a tale as old as time. If time were born back in the 1970s. You see, the whole concept began back in 1973 when a doctor named Ben Feingold created a diet named after himself: The Feingold Diet. Now, this guy wasn't just some Joe Schmoe doctor walking off the streets; he was a prominent figure in the field. He had studied under Professor Clemens von Pirquet, who, among other things, was the guy that originated the term "allergy." So, yeah, kind of a big deal.
The point is, when Feingold came out with this diet, people listened. And they listened even harder when he said that his diet was gonna be the thing that helped treat hyperactivity in kids. Because on behalf of all the tired, overworked parents out there, if someone says they know how to make your kids behave better, oh boy, do you listen. The basic premise of the Feingold Diet was that kids were becoming more hyperactive due to all the additives and artificial flavorings present in their food
. While he didn't directly point to sugar as the cause of all that hyperactivity, people started to make a connection, a connection that good old Ben would heavily reinforce with his book, Why Your Child Is Hyperactive, just two years later. His book was focused around the case of a young boy who loved soft drinks and candy and who would go crazy after birthday parties and during gatherings around the holidays, where he'd consume a lot of both of those things. Yeah, despite being a doctor with d
ecades of education under his belt, he couldn't think of any other reason why a small child might get hyperactive during parties full of friends, games, and people that he loved. It just had to be all the sugar from the sodas and candy and cakes that he was consuming. And so, how did the good doctor propose that you solve this hyperactivity problem? By the Feingold Diet, of course! Basically, the book was just all marketing for his diet. But if the science is sound, then that shouldn't matter, r
ight? Well, unfortunately, the science, it wasn't sound. See, our bodies need sugar. They need it. Every cell in our body uses glucose, a form of sugar for energy. When you eat sweet foods like cakes or candies, your body breaks down the sugar and absorbs it as glucose. This, in turn, raises your blood sugar levels. In other words, you got a lot of sugar pumping through your body that's ready to use by your cells. All your body needs is the green light, then, to use it. And that green light come
s in the form of the hormone insulin. Insulin is basically the body telling itself that it's time to absorb the glucose. As the cells use up the glucose, your blood sugar levels start to dip, causing your body to release a different hormone, glucagon, which, no, is not the evolution of a Gen 5 Pokemon. Instead, it's basically the opposite of insulin. Its job is to tell our bodies to release some of our stored-up sugar supplies to balance out our blood sugar levels. Our bodies are extremely good
at keeping these things in check when we're healthy. So, barring a condition like diabetes, we don't generally experience excessively high or excessively low blood sugar levels. That post-sugar crash that you sometimes feel? It isn't so much a crash, it's just your blood sugar returning back down to normal equilibrium. And here's where we start to dip into some confusion. There's a fairly big difference between what we commonly refer to as energy and what energy means in a scientific sense. When
you or I talk about energy, it's typically to describe things like level of alertness. Energy is the opposite of fatigue. It's energy drinks. It's things that keep you awake and strong. But energy, the science term, is just your body's ability to carry out its everyday processes. And in food, this energy is measured in calories. So, here's where the mix-up occurs: sugar happens to be calorically dense, meaning that a small amount of it gives the body a lot of energy. But it's not the bouncing-o
ff-the-walls kind that most people see on TV and in movies and on the Jumbotron during sports games, it's giving your body plenty of fuel to keep going. The excess is stored as fat. It's not released as hyperactivity. And this is something that science has looked into and proven time and time again in the aftermath of the Feingold diet. There have been over a dozen double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trials disproving the connection between hyperactivity and sugar. And it's worth noting
that that jargon dump of words right there, that is the gold standard we're talking about when it comes to scientific analysis, where you've eliminated all other variables and sources of bias just to focus on one thing and one thing only. And in the case of these studies, that one thing is whether sugar causes hyperactivity. In fact, there was a meta-analysis done, essentially just a combination of multiple independent studies, that compiled 16 of these randomized controlled tests and found onc
e and for all that sugar did not affect the behavior or performance of people. So, go ahead, eat your fun-sized Snickers and chug your Pixie Stix till you're blue in the face or, probably more accurately, till your tongue is blue in your face. Except that still doesn't answer the one major question here. Why does the myth perpetuate? Why does it seem like kids get more hyper after they consume sugar? Well, it all boils down to two main factors. The first is anecdotal bias. The issue is when you
expect a certain outcome, your brain tries its best to see it. Basically, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. For instance, there was one study in 1994 where a group of kids were given a sugar-free drink. Half the group's parents were told the truth and the other half were told that this thing was full of sugar. Can you guess what happened? I bet you can. The parents who thought that their kids had just chugged down a mountain of sugar reported that their kids were more hyperactive. Without realizi
ng it, they started seeking out the behavior that they deemed as hyperactive and even changed how they interacted with their kids, which then influenced how the kids reacted to them. It was all a self-generated problem. The second reason for the fine gold fallacy, though, is a bit more complicated, and actually the complete opposite of what you'd expect. It's actually fatigue. You see, the whole idea of the sugar rush is actually more of a sugar bust. Recent research has shown that sugar actuall
y seems to increase fatigue levels, making you feel more tired and less alert after you eat it. Remember when I said that the sugar rush is all in your head? Well, it is, in more ways than one. Sugar prompts the release of dopamine in the brain. Essentially, it's the brain congratulating itself for eating a calorically dense food, making you happy and making you crave it more. It is literally altering your brain chemistry to make you addicted to it. Over a long period of time, your body will mak
e less dopamine, and have less dopamine receptors to balance out the effects of the sugar. But in the short term, after the rush of dopamine to your body ends and you work to return to normal levels, you feel symptoms of dopamine deficiency, including lack of motivation, fatigue, lack of concentration, and trouble sleeping. What's worse is that sugar inhibits the production of orexin, a chemical in your brain that stimulates the feeling of being awake. The more sugar you eat, the more sleepy and
sluggish you feel. And that right there is important. You see, fatigue presents itself in vastly different ways depending on what age you are. When adults are tired, they get sleepy. You can actually thank evolution for that one. Back when our survival depended on long days of hunting and gathering, adult bodies that got tired were actually more efficient and helped conserve energy, which is actually why you feel lethargic. It helped to conserve energy for the next day full of hunting and gathe
ring. It's also why we're programmed to try and find quick fixes for the depleted energy stores, hence why you tend to snack when you get tired. For adults, survival depended on smart energy storage. But when kids get tired, they get hyperactive, getting fidgety just like you'd expect from someone who just pounded a pack of Sour Patch Kids. And again, back in the olden days when we were at risk of getting mauled to death by bears, giant birds, and saber-toothed cats, a child's survival depended
on being able to react quickly to a threat, even when tired. When a child gets overtired, the main hormone secreted is cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol is designed to make us more alert and is great for a fight-or-flight response, but children respond to that chemical process differently. Some by becoming giddy and running wildly around the house, others by becoming angry, grumpy, and short-tempered, the exact sorts of behavior that were synonymous with a sugar rush. In short, the stereoty
pical sugar rush is really just two parts: one, blood sugar and dopamine levels lowering back down to normal, and two, kids being tired from all the excitement of birthday parties and trick-or-treating while sugar blocks their orexin levels, preventing them from feeling tired. So this Halloween, after you binge those fun-sized candy bars with your kids, make sure to all take a nap; because whether you're a kid bouncing off the walls or an adult struggling to form a sentence, everyone is just sle
epy. But hey, that's just a theory. A food theory! Bon appétit.
Comments