We just passed Halloween and Thanksgiving, and Christmas is lurking right around the corner. If you’re a person with an affinity for candy, eggnog, or rich desserts, you should think twice before indulging. At Carolina Dunes Behavioral Health, in Leland, North Carolina, we encourage our patients to take a holistic approach to their mental health, and that includes being mindful of the impact our diets can have on our emotional well-being.
Correlations Between Mental Illness and High Sugar Intake
Researchers have found that consuming too much sugar, regardless of what form that sugar takes, increases a person’s risk of:
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Self-harm
Not only does high intake increase the risk, but the higher the intake, the higher the risk. This was particularly pronounced in people who were classified as obese.
How Sugar Harms Mental Health
Sugar can make you feel better in the short-term, by preventing your brain from secreting cortisol, a stress hormone. That temporary relief, however, wires your brain to crave sugar when it is stressed, rather than using other coping skills. Prolonged intake of high volumes of sugar can increase the risk for diabetes, obesity, and other medical concerns, which also increase the risk of mental health disorders.
Gender Differences
Men are at greater risk of mental health conditions resulting from high sugar intake than women. Men who consume more than 40 grams of sugar per day are at especially high risk of developing depression.
Moderation Is Key
The good news is that a moderate amount of sugar is associated with low rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm. You don’t have to entirely give up sweets, just make sure that you’re not indulging too much. Some ways you can reduce your sugar intake include:
- Reading nutrition labels. When you’re shopping, compare ingredient lists and sugar amounts across products. As you become more aware of how much sugar things contain, you can make more informed decisions about whether and how much of them you want to eat.
- Drinking more water. Many people forget to include the sugar they consume in beverages when they are estimating their sugar intake, and those calories can add up really fast.
- Adding less sugar. When you’re preparing pancakes, cereal, tea, coffee, or other things where it’s common to add sugar, try cutting the amount of sugar you use in half and then reducing from them.
- Sweeten with fruit. Better yet, replace the sugar you would add to foods with fresh fruit, so that you can get some nutritional value with that sweet taste you like.
- Eliminate syrups. When you’re purchasing canned fruits, look for options in water or natural fruit juice, instead of syrup or synthetic juice.
- Replace sugar with flavored extracts. Sometimes, you can replace the sugar in a recipe with orange, almond, vanilla, or lemon extract.
- Reduce sugar when baking. In many cases, you can leave out a third of the recommended sugar without any noticeable difference.
- Instead of focusing on cutting sugar, focus on getting what you need. Rather than thinking about what you should not have, it may be easier to focus on what your body needs to function at its best. If you eat more like certain Mediterranean and Asian cultures, by making sure to get plenty of fresh produce, unprocessed grains, fish and seafood, with a modest amount of lean meat and dairy, you may find that you have less interest in sugary foods.
Sugar Withdrawal Is Real
There is still some disagreement about whether or not it is possible to become addicted to sugar. On the other hand, there are definitely side effects when people suddenly shift from consuming a lot of sugar to no sugar at all. This includes:
- Anxiety – for some people, it can even feel like they are having a panic attack
- Irritability
- Confusion
- Fatigue
If you find that you experience these symptoms when you don’t have sugar, you may need to gradually wean yourself off sugar, rather than quitting cold turkey.
At Carolina Dunes Behavioral Health, we believe that a person’s mental health is impacted by their physical well-being. We encourage our clients to engage in self-care that nurtures them as a whole person, regardless of their stage of life. While we believe that it’s never too late to make a change, we also know that the sooner a person takes action, the sooner they can begin to recover.
