By Colleen Huber

The Nagging Sweet Tooth

If you've got a sweet tooth, you know that it doesn't let you ignore it for very long. At least once every day or two, the boss lets you know who's in charge. You rummage around the kitchen for sweets, check the back of the refrigerator and dart out to the store if necessary.

A sense of sugar/chocolate deprivation sets in, and demands that you do something about it. In a perfect world, a sweet tooth would be satisfied for weeks at a time by an especially large dessert or other massive binge. Wouldn't that be convenient!

Why does this happen? How does a person who regularly indulges their sweet tooth end up feeling more deprived than those insufferably serene types who don't eat sweets?

It has to do with a process called homeostasis. When you eat a lot of sugar, your body notes that your blood glucose level is higher than normal. As a result, the pancreas secretes insulin, which packs this sugar away into cells that process it, in order to bring your blood sugar back to normal. When a lot of sugar is ingested, a lot of insulin comes out and packs it all away, which overcompensates and swings your blood sugar too low for a while.

This accounts for the afternoon brain fog (transient hypoglycemia) often experienced after a high-carbohydrate lunch. And this is when the sweet tooth (really, just a euphemism for a sugar habit plus a fluctuating blood glucose) wakes up and reminds you who's really the boss.

Quieting the Sugar Addict in you

Of course it doesn't have to be this way. Sugar cravings, like all others, can be overcome by substituting equally satisfactory foods of better quality. You just have to know exactly what kinds of good foods can satisfy which kinds of urges.

Cravings are actually the manifestation of a mild malnutrition, certainly not with severe overt consequences, as say scurvy or rickets. Rather, a great many people on the Standard American Diet (SAD in more ways than one) suffer from a milder malnutrition from eating only depleted, processed foods and not enough whole, nutrient-rich foods.

As a result, we end up craving the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that we lack. But while your body may know that you are missing say for example magnesium, your conscious mind is not aware of the flavor of magnesium.

Instead, because of familiarity, you can reminisce and feel hungry for the flavor of chocolate, which is high in magnesium. It also has its appeal partly rooted in its magnesium. The chocolate that your conscious mind desires has the greatest ability to quench those cravings due to chocolate's high magnesium content.

Of course, the sugar in commercially prepared chocolate is another desperate desire after you have ridden the sugar-insulin roller coaster long enough to plummet to the abyss of hypoglycemia.

Fruit: Not Just Another Sweetener

People often ask, "Isn't fruit just as bad for you as desserts with its refined carbohydrates and concentrated sweeteners?" The answer: Definitely not! Refined carbohydrates, such as sugar and flour are only fragments from original whole foods that contain all of the molecules necessary for their optimal digestion.

What's left by the time it's packaged and sold to you as a dessert is something quite different, an artery-slathering, fibreless, nutrient-robbed shadow of its former self.

Fruit, on the other hand, has the fiber necessary to slow down the entry of natural sugars to the bloodstream, which keeps your insulin at moderate levels. Insulin is what is particularly important not to let spike too high.

Some fruits are better at this than others. For example, mangos and papayas tend to spike blood sugar and insulin, more than apples, because apples contain the natural sugars that are slowed down by the accompanying fiber. Another advantage of fruit is that it has not been stripped of its inherent vitamins, minerals and enzymes, many of which are necessary for its complete digestion.

This article is continued in Part 3

Colleen Huber, 46, is a wife, mother and student at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, Ariz., where she is training to be a naturopathic physician. Her original research on the mechanism of migraines has appeared in Lancet and Headache Quarterly, and was reported in The Washington Post.

Her double blind placebo controlled research in homeopathy has appeared in Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, European Journal of Classical Homeopathy, and Homeopathy Today. Her website Naturopathy Works introduces naturopathic medicine to the layperson and provides references to the abundant medical literature demonstrating that natural medicine does work.