The DOPAMINE CORRELATION: How alcohol, sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and hard drugs all have one common underlying effect that keeps consumers ‘hooked’

  There are many addictive substances on planet earth, and most consumers never meant to become so hooked that they can’t find a way to quit, or even cut back. As with most addictive substances, the more often the frequency of use, and the more potent the substance, the more dopamine is released in the brain, but over time, this fuels serious mental and physical health issues.

When trying to cut back or quit addictive, dopamine-heightening substances, a person’s dopamine levels are quite low, waiting for the addictive ‘crutch’ to assist, and that’s when stress, depression, and anxiety drag most people right back into their bad habits.

Dopamine is a chemical released in the brain that helps nerve cells send messages that are important for both the brain and body. This ‘feel good’ hormone is regulated by the body, but addictive substances disrupt normal production, causing dysfunction of neurotransmitters, and can create a roller-coaster effect of thrilling highs but intolerable lows....<<<Read More>>>...

The truth about sugar addiction

[Mercola]: When you eat sugary foods, the reward center of your brain, known as the nucleus accumbens, is stimulated through increased signals of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in your perception of pleasure.

Because eating sugar makes you feel good, you're likely to eat it often. As you consume excessive amounts of sugar on a regular basis, your body's dopamine signals become weaker and you develop tolerance, so you have to eat more sugar to get the same level of reward, eventually resulting in sugar addiction.

This is why manufacturers use sugar to drive your behaviour.

There have been many studies regarding the addictive potential of sugar. For instance, a 2018 review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine states that "sugar has been found to produce more symptoms than is required to be considered an addictive substance."

It exhibits drug-like effects such as bingeing, craving, tolerance, withdrawal, cross-sensitization, cross-tolerance and cross-dependence. Another study published in the journal Neuroscience states that intermittent bingeing on sucrose and abusing drugs can both increase extracellular dopamine in the nucleus accumbens...read more>>>...

Industrially processed fructose is just as addictive as alcohol and even morphine, concludes study

Natural News: Sweets are well-loved by millions of people across the world, with at least 50 pounds of processed fructose being consumed per year. If you find yourself constantly eating and craving sweets, don’t immediately dismiss this as nothing serious.

Fructose, which means “fruit sugar,” is ordinarily healthy when taken in moderate amounts in the form of fruit. However, industrially-processed fructose is not the same and actually is very unhealthy. The majority of fructose in a person’s diet comes in the form of sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup, which also contain 50 and 45 percent glucose, respectively. Generally, fructose is more damaging than glucose since it can lead to glycation, a process wherein sugar binds to proteins or lipids. This might not sound that bad, but it results in cell and tissue damage.

If you’re wondering just how unhealthy fructose is, consider the fact it shares a lot of similarities with alcohol. One of these is their ability to trigger dopamine production, which is why consuming either of them produces a sense of happiness that can be addicting. Other similarities that they share include the metabolic pathways they are involved in. The close resemblance between these two makes sense since you can easily acquire alcohol from fructose just by adding yeast...read more>>...

The addiction habit

S.O.T.T: Addiction changes the brain but it's not a disease that can be cured with medicine. In fact, it's learned - like a habit.

What all addicts find most maddening (and terrifying) about addiction: its staying power, long after the pleasure has worn off, long after the relief has transformed into extended anxiety, long after they've sworn up and down, to themselves and others, that this would not continue. It's that resilience that has made addiction so incomprehensible to addicts, their families and the experts they turn to for help, while feeding a firestorm of clashing explanations as to what it actually is.

One explanation is that addiction is a brain disease. The United States National Institute on Drug Abuse, the American Society of Addiction Medicine, and the American Medical Association ubiquitously define addiction as a 'chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry' - a definition echoing through their websites, lectures and literature, and, most recently, 'The Surgeon General's Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health' (2016). Such authorities warn us that addiction 'hijacks the brain', replacing the capacity for choice and self-control with an unremitting compulsion to drink or use drugs. In the UK, the medical journal The Lancet has provided a forum for figurehead proponents of the brain-disease model, echoing the government's emphasis on 'withdrawal symptoms, tolerance, detoxification or alcohol-related seizures', which suggests that the royal road to understanding addiction is still medicine.

If addiction changes the brain and drugs cause addiction, the argument went, then perhaps drugs unleash pathological changes, literally damaging neural tissue. The implication that addicts do the things they do because they are ill, not because they are weak, self-indulgent, spineless pariahs (a fairly prevalent view in some quarters) also seemed to benefit addicts and their families. The anger and disgust they often experienced could be mitigated by the presumption of illness; and social stigmatisation - known to compound the misery of those with mental problems - could be relieved, even reversed, by the simple assumption that addicts can't help themselves...read more>>>...