If your New Year's Resolution is to cut out sugar, you're probably not alone.
"Sugar detox" has become something of a buzzword in the dieting world.
But is it fair to compare sugar to drugs? They do have similarities, according to an area physician.
"Sugar is an addiction because it stimulates the pleasure center in the brain, the same as drugs simulate," said Dr. Jamie Jeffrey, a pediatrician at Charleston Area Medical Center and the director of the KEYS4HealthyKids initiative.
"[Sugar] stimulates the same area of the brain as cocaine does and releases dopamine, which is a reward chemical, causing a dopamine rush and leads to cravings," Jeffrey said.
In the first few days, people who stop using sugar may start to feel shaky and tired, Jeffrey said.
"The biggest thing I've hear from patients is the cravings," Jeffrey said. "They want it, they want it, they want it."
She suggests replacing sugars, or simple carbohydrates, with fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
"So you still get the sweetness from an apple but with the fiber with that slows digestion," Jeffrey said.
Jennifer Hillenbrand, a registered dietitian at Saint Francis Hospital, recommends that people limit added sugars in their foods. Those include sodas, cakes, cookies and the like. People should read food labels, she said. Some words to look out for include high-fructose corn syrup and any other syrup and fruit juice concentrate, she said. Anything on the label that ends in "ose" is a sugar, but not all sugars are bad. For instance, lactose, a sugar found in milk, isn't bad.
Besides dealing with cravings, people detoxing from sugar will also have to break old habits. For instance, if they typically have a soda while they sit at their computer, it will take some time for them to get used to not having it, she said.
People will start to feel better in about 10 to 14 days of cutting out sugar, Jeffrey said.
And the less you eat sugar, the less your body craves it, Hillenbrand said.
"The body gets used to all this sugar and it wants it more," she said. "When you cut back, you don't want it as much."
Reducing sugar "long-term leads to weight maintenance, and decreased risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer," Jeffrey said.
As with smokers who decide to quit, people who cut out sugar have to decide whether they want to stop "cold turkey" or slowly wean themselves off it. Jeffrey doesn't encourage cold-turkey sugar detoxes because it wouldn't be appropriate for her young patients. Also because she doesn't want to make sugar the "bad guy," she said. Sugar is blamed for many health and nutrition problems these days, but before sugar, people blamed fat.
"When we decided the fat was the bad guy ... we took out the fat and replaced it with three times more sugar," Jeffrey said.
Instead, Jeffrey recommends decreasing sugar slowly.
To start with, eat your calories and sugar, she said - don't drink them.
"Sugar content in drinks is usually higher and without protein and fiber (in foods we eat) that slows down the absorption of the sugar," she said. "Drinking sugar leads to higher and quicker level of sugar in the bloodstream."
Having too much sugar, Jeffery said, can cause the body to produce too much insulin, which is what happens when we experience a "sugar crash."
She compared to a car's gas tank: if a gas tank holds 20 gallons, but you put 30 gallons in, it's going to overflow. So too, a body's muscles can only handle so much insulin.
"The overflow amount gets stored as fat," Jeffrey said.
According to new guidelines released Thursday, the federal government recommends limiting having less than 10 percent of calories per day from added sugars, or about 200 calories.
Jeffrey also recommends replacing simple carbs like white foods such as bread, pasta, potato, and rice with whole grain foods.
And finally, eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables at meal times each day, she said.
"They are high in nutritional density and fiber at a low calorie cost," Jeffrey said.
Reach Lori Kersey at lori.kersey@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1240 or follow @Lorikerseywv on Twitter.