Your Sugar Addiction is Killing You
Who could have imagined that something so innocent, so delicious, so irresistible — just one glucose molecule (not so sweet) plus one fructose molecule (very sweet) — could propel America toward economic deterioration and medical collapse?
(via theatlantic)
Fantastic quick-read on our dependency on sugar and its effects on our ability to be happy.
This is a PSA for Medication Supported Recovery that I helped organize at Bellevue Hospital last summer. It brings tears to my eyes to see the patient testimonials and the dedication of our faculty and staff. So for those of you who ask, this is what I do at work. Please share with anyone you know that may have a substance use disorder and is seeking help.
From the OASAS site:
How we view the disease of addiction is closely related to our beliefs in regards to the success or failure of treatment. The medical model allows one to treat the disease of addiction with medications, realizing that addiction is a complex disease where interdependent roles are played by the host, the addictive agent and the environment. This video provides first hand accounts of people who have succeeded in recovery with the use of addiction medications along with counseling and other behavioral interventions.
Illustration by Jock.
“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict.”
When I first heard about the technique of flashblood in a meeting a few weeks ago, I was hesitant to believe it was an actual practice…and then low and behold the NYTimes has a piece on it in this week’s Science Times.
Reported in Tanzania, Zanzibar, and Kenya, flashblood is a technique used by heroin addicts whereby they purposely inject the blood of another addict to piggyback on the high or lessen withdrawal symptoms. For countries like Tanzania and Kenya, who have relatively low levels of HIV infection as compared with the rest of Africa, this practice puts users at the highest risk of HIV infection. Heroin only recently became popular in East Africa, with the rise of cheaper injection-grade white heroin creating a new market for drug-use. African women, who already bear the brunt of the HIV epidemic, are the most likely to practice the flashblood technique:
Most of the addicts she has interviewed who practice flashblood, Dr. McCurdy said, are women. For them, sharing blood is more of an act of kindness than an attempt to get high: a woman who has made enough money to buy a sachet of heroin will share blood to help a friend avoid withdrawal. The friend is often a fellow sex worker who has become too old or sick to find customers.
I have no words for what the implications are of this practice.
The Cheat - Salad Day by Sam Sifton
A funny piece from the Times food critic in which he wrestles with his inner demons and the demands of his job (double lunches!) to maintain a “somewhat” healthy lifestyle. Followed by a few quick salad dressing recipes (because it is absolutely the easiest thing to make), there are no excuses for buying store salad dressing again!
Excerpt on why we love restaurant food so much:
The scientists studied the fat rats’ brains. They looked like a cocaine abuser’s: the animals were fiends, addicted to the core. Anyone who has eaten the deep-fried lamb scrumpets at April Bloomfield’s Breslin restaurant in the Ace Hotel in Manhattan knows just where this is going. I thought about stealing a car stereo once, just to finance another order. We’re all just rats in a maze.
The phone rings and it’s that patient that I had nearly given up on, the one that tried my patience, never had a clean tox-screen, the one who had disappeared months into our intervention, the one who I thought I had lost.
They went to detox, they’re 28-days sober, and they want to come back to Bup clinic and make the committment to staying clean.
Screw the relapse statistics, screw the Doubting Thomas’. What matters is the patient trusts me and is coming back (which they rarely do in other programs), and we’ll do whatever we can to help.
Excerpted slides from: Inside Our Brain:Obesity and Dopamine Deficiency
- dopamine is important in: movement, motivation, reward and well-being
- substance users & the obese have low dopamine brain activity which indicates an under-stimulated reward system —> perpetuating pathological behavior, i.e. binge eating & drug use because they need to compensate for a decreased reward circuit activation.
Dopamine article in NYTimes
Dopamine simply makes a relevant object almost impossible to ignore… Recreational drugs like cocaine tend to block that transporter, allowing dopamine to linger in the neuronal vestibule and keep punching its signal along.
So excited that Nora Volkow is the keynote speaker for Thursday’s Advances in Addiction Research and Practice seminar.
grinning, soapboxing, avoiding gluten.
laurahuben@gmail.com
gluten-free goodies
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