{"id":14677,"date":"2020-01-28T14:18:58","date_gmt":"2020-01-28T14:18:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/squad\/?p=14677"},"modified":"2020-01-28T14:18:58","modified_gmt":"2020-01-28T14:18:58","slug":"how-sugar-changes-your-brain-in-12-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/nutrition\/how-sugar-changes-your-brain-in-12-days\/","title":{"rendered":"How Sugar Changes Your Brain in 12 Days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A new study from Aarhus University has found that sugar intake alters the same part of the brain that creates a drug addiction. The research showed that by using the reward-processing circuitry of the brain, sugar tricks the brain to respond to it like other drugs, encouraging you to repeat the behavior that caused you to feel pleasure.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Sugar and the brain<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The researchers studied the effects of sugar on seven female minipigs by looking at their opioid and dopamine receptors under PET imaging.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">They fed them a sucrose solution for an hour a day for 12 days and then waited 24 hours after the last dose to see if their brains had changed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cAfter just 12 days of sugar intake, we could see major changes in the brain\u2019s dopamine and opioid systems,\u201d explains Michael Winterdahl, associate professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus. \u201cIn fact, the opioid system, which is that part of the brain\u2019s chemistry that is associated with well-being and pleasure, was already activated after the very first intake.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">More specifically, the scientists saw changes to the:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> thalamus<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> amygdala<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> striatum<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> nucleus accumbens<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> cingulate cortex<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> prefrontal cortex<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3><b>Why use pigs?<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Although rats are often the animal of choice for experiments like this because their brains are similar to humans, the rodents\u2019 ability to help regulate metabolism and weight gain can be very different than humans.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Pigs\u2019 have a more complex brain than rats and pigs\u2019 brains are large enough to use human brain scanners and take imaging of deep brain structures.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Still, the results on humans might prove to be different because we are more difficult to control and our dopamine levels can be affected by a variety of factors.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201c[Humans] are influenced by what we eat,\u201d explains Winterdahl, \u201cwhether we play games on our phones, or if we enter a new romantic relationship in the middle of the trial, with potential for great variation in the data.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study from Aarhus University has found that sugar intake alters the same part of the brain that creates a drug addiction. The research showed that by using the reward-processing circuitry of the brain, sugar tricks the brain to respond to it like other drugs, encouraging you to repeat the behavior that caused you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[453],"tags":[782,1130],"class_list":["post-14677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nutrition","tag-soda","tag-sugar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14677\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthymale.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}