Are you one of those folks who reach for a sugary Drink or a Candy Bar when you need a a pick-me-up? I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but researchers have proven that a Sugar hit not only doesn’t help your mood or energy level, but can make you feel worse as well as making you fatter…
Forest Gump (Tom Hanks) drinks ‘about 15 Dr. Peppers’ at the White House.
The Sugary Soda mega-hit certainly didn’t make him feel any better…
The quest…
Researchers simply wanted to determine if the so-called ‘Sugar Rush’ was a real phenomenon or just an urban legend.
What they did…
The clinical study the devised, “investigated the effect of sugar on various aspects of mood, including anger, alertness, depression, and fatigue. They also considered how factors such as the quantity and type of sugar consumed might affect mood, and whether engaging in demanding mental and physical activities made any difference.”
As is the case with so many university studies these days, researchers from the University of Warwick (UK), Humboldt University of Berlin, and Lancaster University (UK) data mined the results of 31 different surveys involving almost 1,300 subjects from a number of different countries.
What they found…
The team sums up its findings as follows:
- Sugar consumption has virtually no effect on mood, regardless of how much sugar is consumed or whether people engage in demanding activities after taking it.
- People who consumed sugar felt more tired and less alert than those who had not.
- The idea of a ‘sugar rush’ is a myth without any truth behind it.
The takeaway…
“The idea that sugar can improve mood has been widely influential in popular culture, so much so that people all over the world consume sugary drinks to become more alert or combat fatigue,” says study co-Author Dr. Konstantinos Mantantzis, from Humboldt University. “Our findings very clearly indicate that such claims are not substantiated — if anything, sugar will probably make you feel worse.”
Professor Elizabeth Maylor, from the University of Warwick added: “We hope that our findings will go a long way to dispel the myth of the ‘sugar rush’ and inform public health policies to decrease sugar consumption.”
My take…
The public health policies Maylor refers to are aimed at reducing the consumption of excess, or added, Sugar – a leading contributor to the global obesity crisis, which in turn is linked to heart, disease type 2 diabetes and a whole laundry list of other serious and chronic diseases. If proving that the traditional ‘sugar hit’ does not, in fact, produce an energy boost or an increase in alertness can help some folks reduce their Sugar consumption, that’s good.
I think it’s equally important that researchers take a long look at Caffeine consumption. It’s no coincidence that so-called Energy Drinks – which are loaded with Sugar (based on the common, now disproved belief that Sugar gives you a boost) as well as Caffeine. One can of your average Energy Drink may contain the same amount of Caffeine as contained in several cups of Coffee. This close relationship between Sugar and Caffeine isn’t new; folks have been drinking strong Coffee with multiple teaspoons of Sugar to ‘stay awake’ for at least as long as I can remember.
Meanwhile, let’s all have a nice cup of Green Tea…
~ Maggie J.