Everyone loves to hate on sugar. Do a quick internet search, and you’ll see reams of hostile indictments of sugar from health nuts, influencers, athletes, and the media. At times, that has included the media outlet you’re reading right now.
A few years ago, I wrote a DIY electrolyte drink recipe for a print issue of Backpacker. Not surprisingly, the recipe contained sugar, which facilitates the body’s uptake of water (and makes the otherwise salt-forward drink palatable). My editor’s feedback: “Isn’t sugar basically poison?”
I used to think so. For about a decade, I avoided sugar like the plague. I only drank black coffee and plain water, and I convinced myself I liked sour yogurt and pancakes without syrup. I thought this was the noble and correct thing to do. After all, my friends often prefaced a dessert order with, “I’m going to be bad today,” and a non-order with “I’m trying to be good.” Sugar-free products were marketed as “guilt-free.” There was a subtle, implied morality to not eating sugar. Then there were the not-so-subtle headlines. Reputable websites ran (and continue to run) stories saying that sugar causes cancer, rots your teeth, is linked to diabetes and heart disease, and is as addictive as cocaine.
So, I kept it out of my diet. I was convinced sugar would make me sick. But as it turned out, avoiding sugar made me sicker.
The Impact of Severe Sugar Restriction
Because I was restricting my sugar intake, I thought about sweets all the time. I had constant cravings. Whenever I did indulge, some switch flipped in my brain, and I lost all semblance of self-control. A slice of cake would turn into three. A single cookie would turn into the whole box. We call that binge eating.
For a while, I was convinced that sugar was again the root of the problem, and that I must suffer from sugar addiction. I told myself I was a junkie, and that if I could just have more willpower—if I could stop being so goddamned weak—I could go cold turkey and kick my “addiction” for good.
My diet got progressively stricter. Then it turned into an eating disorder.
The disorder—brought on partly by stress and partly by societally induced fears around food and weight gain—stuck with me for about a decade. I tried therapy. I exercised more, and then less. I experimented with different diets. I took vitamins and supplements. I tried everything I could think of, but the sugar obsession remained. At some point, I realized that maybe it wasn’t the sugar that was the problem—maybe it was the restriction of the sugar.
Human beings want what we can’t have. We’ve evolved to respond to scarcity with obsession. If your brain thinks something isn’t available to you, it’s wired to seek that thing out—especially when that thing is an energy-dense food. And, most of the time, your brain doesn’t know the difference between “I can’t have this because I’ve put myself on a diet,” and “I can’t have this because we’re in a famine, and this food is in critical shortage, and if I’m going to survive I need to find it right now.”
While most Americans do not have full-on eating disorders like I did (around nine percent of people in the U.S. struggle with one), many people, especially athletic types, are on the spectrum of disordered eating. Obsession over a specific food type, feeling like some foods are “safe foods” and others are evil or scary, constant low-level hunger, and irrepressible thoughts about what you just ate or what your next snack is going to be—i.e., “food noise”—are all symptoms of some kind of wonky relationship with food. My food problems were on the severe end of the spectrum, but these are patterns millions of people struggle with. And after ten years of trying various methods to get over them, there was only one thing that worked: I started eating tons of sugar.
How Bad Is Sugar Really?
When I embarked upon the high-sugar diet, I thought it might cure my eating disorder. In theory, that would improve my stress, clear up my skin, make me less depressed, and help me live longer. But with all the anti-sugar research out there, it’s easy to wonder: Was I just digging myself a different grave with a new shovel?
Let’s start with the dental woes. It’s true that sugar can cause cavities. However, so can other simple carbohydrates, including cheese puffs, chips, crackers, and other ultra-processed foods. Also, my dentist told me that if I brush my teeth after I eat sugar, I can pretty much eat as much as I want without rotting my teeth. So that’s cool.
It’s also true that high sugar consumption has been linked to obesity and heart disease. However, it’s difficult to draw lines of causation there. That’s because high sugar consumption is also positively correlated with poverty, low socioeconomic status, and poor access to healthcare—and we know for a fact that all these things have a greater effect on health outcomes than any one feature of the diet.
Sugar is also linked to diabetes, but again indirectly: weight gain is a stronger predictor of the development of Type II diabetes, and weight gain is generally caused by higher caloric intake—not necessarily by the consumption of any one food. Plus, rates of sugar consumption in the U.S. have been dropping over the last decade, but rates of obesity are still going up. That means sugar intake and extreme weight gain may not be as tightly correlated as we thought.
There’s also no scientific evidence that sugar is physically addictive. Remember the “cocaine is as addictive as sugar” headline? That media storm was fueled by a handful of 2014 studies done on rats. Some of the rats did exhibit addiction-like behavior, but only when their access to sugar was intermittently restricted. When they were given as much sugar as they wanted, they didn’t care about it much. When they felt it was off-limits to them most of the time, they went nuts upon receiving a brief window of access. Sound familiar?
The other problem with dieting and restriction is that it causes a lot of stress. Calorie counting, worrying about what you just ate, worrying about what you’re going to eat next, and guilting yourself for falling off the bandwagon are all sources of chronic stress.
In one 50-year study of middle-class Finnish men, dubbed the Helsinki Businessman Study, hundreds of participants were given a health and fitness routine to stick to for decades, while hundreds of others were left to their own devices. The study examined all kinds of metrics about their health and wellness during this time. But the unignorable pattern in the data was this: Those who were given a health and fitness regime to stick to died earlier. The researchers were stunned. They ultimately concluded that the stress of sticking to such a regime—on top of maintaining family obligations and high-powered careers—was likely enough to impact the participants’ longevity.
So, where does this leave us? We can probably conclude that strict or restrictive diets aren’t good for most people. We can also say that sugar likely isn’t great for you, either. But we can’t say that it’s poison. The science is just too fuzzy. But if that’s the case, then why is there so much information out there demonizing sugar?
Why We All Love to Hate Sugar
There’s been some level of societal repulsion around sugar ever since the Victorian days. Like dancing, parties, or premarital sex, sugar was seen as excessive and therefore sinful. So, there’s some of that prejudice lurking in the background. But also, it’s just having a bit of a moment, the same way dietary fat did a few decades ago.
“Dietary fat was the demonized nutrient of choice in the 90s,” says Katie Barylski, a Colorado-based registered dietitian. “When people started focusing on lowering their fat intake, they started eating a lot more sugar because they needed some way to flavor their food. That naturally led to an increased focus on sugar, which led to more research.” Sometimes, more research on a particular nutrient is a good thing. But not every study produces clear results with robust methodologies. Often, you get a sea of complex or not-so-significant findings, too, which sometimes get spun up into misleading headlines. That’s especially true when the topic is nutrition, an topic humans particularly love to obsess over.
“There’s a lot of fear-mongering around sugar now,” Barylski says. “Some of it is founded. But there’s also a lot we don’t know.”
My Box-of-Cookies-a-Day Diet
About three years ago, I got fed up with feeling insane around food. Cookies were a particular trigger. So, I decided to eat a box of cookies every day until they didn’t feel magical and forbidden anymore. It took a lot of cookies. No, it wasn’t that fun. Yes, I gained weight. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that I went into the experiment knowing I would do anything to feel sane again—including having to buy all new pants. At the end of the experiment, I did. But I also got what I wanted: I could eat a donut without wanting to eat the whole box. I could eat half a piece of cake without obsessing over it for the rest of the night. I could have a cookie and put the box back in the cupboard and completely forget it was there. More importantly, because food had become neutral, I could finally work out and take dance classes and play outside just because I wanted to—not because I felt like I had to burn off some “sin” from the night before.
I no longer eat a box of cookies every day. (It’s really not that fun after a while.) But I still eat much more than the FDA-recommended daily limit of 50 grams of sugar a day. I probably eat double that. And you know what? I’m happier and healthier than when I was on my black-coffee-and-plain-yogurt diet. I sleep better, I’m less stressed, and my energy levels are much higher. I haven’t binged in years, or packed my lunch to a party to avoid snacking, or white-knuckled my way through a friend-group dinner because I was afraid I’d give in to a craving. My athletic performance (as measured by ultramarathon times and UIAA Ice Climbing team rankings) has also improved.
But is my current sugar consumption healthy? I asked Barylski.
“If someone were worried about whether there’s an overrepresentation of added sugars in their diet, I would wonder about their energy levels over the course of the day,” she says. “Are they noticing significant dips in energy levels? What are their moods looking like?”
The immediate symptoms of eating too much sugar (for your particular body) are mood swings and energy slumps, which indicate that there might be some hormonal implications related to the blood-sugar spikes. But if those things aren’t happening, and the rest of the body is functioning pretty well, Barylski says, there’s not a ton of reason to worry about it.
“If you’re eating a diet that otherwise features a wide variety of different foods, we don’t really know what the long-term impacts of higher sugar intake are,” she says. “It’s really, really hard to isolate the impact of a single nutrient. Plus, how your sugar intake affects you is not going to be the same for every person eating that amount of sugar.”
Are All Sugars Created Equal?
There is some current research demonstrating that certain types of sugars—like fructose, especially as it appears in high-fructose corn syrup—are metabolized by the body differently, and therefore could have more negative long-term impacts, particularly on the liver. But does that mean you should pore over nutrition labels and stress yourself out trying to avoid particular types of sugar? Barylski says, probably not.
“I think we are too stressed about sugar,” she says. “I don’t find it helpful to talk about the negative consequences of sugar and to solely recommend people focus on eliminating sugar from their diets. Sugar is a huge part of our celebrations and our experience as human beings. And, it’s not always bad for you. Period.”
Plus, active people can get away with eating significantly more sugar than the average person.
“Athletes metabolize sugar more efficiently,” Barylski says. “It’s part of the adaptations that occur to maintain and sustain certain levels of endurance activity. They usually need more sugar, and often need more sources of simple, straightforward sugars, particularly before, during, and after exercise.”
So, instead of focusing on sugar, which we don’t have a huge amount of conclusive evidence about, Barylski says it’s better to focus on the behaviors that we do have tons of research on:
“That’s eating fruits and vegetables, not smoking, drinking no more than a moderate amount of alcohol, and having a movement practice,” Barylski says. Do that, and you’re probably going to be just fine.
