If we eat or drink a sugar loaded product, our taste buds and brain instantly acknowledge the sweetness. To most people a sugary treat tastes good! Unfortunately, eating foods high in sugar very often will cause our health to suffer, including our brain health.

The moment your brain gets the message from your taste buds that they recognize sweetness, the reward pathways in your brain are activated and trigger the release of dopamine – your happy hormone. This is why you feel good when you are eating something sweet.

The problem is that if you keep eating sugary foods, your brain’s reward system will be chronically activated. This puts you at risk of craving these types of foods every day, or as often as possible. You begin to crave a sugar hit!

This is when you start to lose control and your body develops an increased intolerance towards the amount of sugar that you consume. If this continues, you may develop a sugar addiction and will likely begin to give in to your cravings.

Neuroscientist Nicole Avena says that an over-stimulated reward system of the brain will trigger the occurrence of several adverse reactions in your brain and body.

Sugar and Your Brain’s Neurotransmitters

Eating sugary foods often leads you to experience a sugar crash. Soon after eating sugar, you may feel a rush of energy, but then the “crash” occurs. This crash is a result of your blood sugar levels plummeting. This happens because, when your body receives a large load of sugar, a huge energy source, it does a panic release of insulin to deal with the sugar and as a result your blood sugar levels may crash.

This sugar crash usually manifests in the form of “brain fog,” irritability, fatigue and a change in mood. Once your body’s glucose levels dip, you are bound to feel moody, depressed and anxious. You may also feel suddenly very tired and want to lay down.

Part of the reason that this negative reaction occurs is because the sugar adversely affects your brain’s neurotransmitters. Not only does the sugar release dopamine, the excessive sugar consumption leads another hormone, serotonin, to be excessively produced as well. Once this hormone becomes depleted, your happy mood is depleted too.

Your sugary treats can have you craving sugar again to boost your mood once more, in a vicious cycle.

Excessive Sugar Intake Increases Risk of Cognitive Decline

Studies show that excessive sugar consumption slows down the brain and affects memory and learning. This is why it is a bad idea to allow children to eat sugary cereals for breakfast before school.

Regular, excessive sugar consumption also may lead to the development of insulin resistance. This then leads to problems regulating the body’s blood sugar levels, and therefore increases the risk of developing Diabetes.

Insulin plays a crucial role in strengthening the synaptic connections in between the cells of the brain. This is critical for better communication between the neurotransmitters and memory.

Once insulin production dwindles, cognitive processes may suffer. Evidence strongly indicates that the brain is one of the main victims of high sugar consumption.

Sugar Can become An Addiction

When you consume sugar, your brain’s prefrontal cortex becomes activated and your “feel good” hormones, such as dopamine, are released. This sends a signal to your brain that it should remember this great feeling. As with any addiction, this is how it begins. It’s a “want more of” feeling.

Sugar also activates the brain’s nucleus accumbens, which is the pleasure center. If the pleasure center is turned off, this is when the person may develop depression. Alternatively, if it is stimulated, by consuming sugar for example, then the “want more of” (addiction to the substance) may begin.

As this cycle occurs, the signal being sent to the pleasure center becomes weaker. This makes the person consume even more sugar in order to feel that wonderful feeling again. As you can see, the sugar consumption is no longer filling the void it once did, and the more it is consumed, the more health issues arise. This is the way all addictions work.

In hunter/gatherer societies the body’s reaction to sweet foods is useful, encouraging the person to eat the energy-supplying foods, which are not overly abundant. But in modern society sugary and fatty foods are all too available, and that is what may get us into trouble.

The reason that overeating sweets becomes an unhealthy addiction is because the sugary foods leads the brain to create a path that becomes easy to activate. This newly developed path, or circuit, serves as a shortcut to pleasurable feelings, each time that sugar is consumed. Unfortunately, this circuit will eventually become the brain’s default path, and this translates to addiction.

Chronic consumption of sugary foods can also cause your brain to not recognize the signals that you should stop eating. The sugar dulls the signals the brain needs to keep you and your body healthy. This is in part because excessive sugar consumption leads to the reduction of oxytocin, which plays a role in preventing binge eating.

Therein lies the vicious cycle to a sugar addiction and the health of your brain. The more sugar you eat, the more you crave, and the more you eat the more damage to your brain’s health.