Читать книгу Sugar Addicts’ Diet - Nicki Waterman - Страница 7

Most of us love sugar. We are biologically driven to enjoy sweetness because it helps us identify foods that are safe to eat rather than poisonous (as bitter foods might suggest). Experiments on 10-day-old babies show that when an adult gives them a dummy dipped in sugar solution, they gurgle and look pleased when they see that adult again. Our desire for sweetness is something we can learn from a very young age – and never forget.

But an extreme love of sugar isn’t an inevitability – that’s something we can prompt by our actions when selecting foods for our children. Professor Aubrey Sheiham, Professor of Dental Public Health at University College London, has written extensively on sugars and health. He says there’s a crucial ‘window’ for overdeveloping this natural preference for sweetness in children and it becomes apparent when a child is weaning. At this point, they become ‘picky’ as they learn which foods are likely to be ‘safe’ and which are likely to be ‘harmful’. If this preference is indulged with lots of highly sweet foods, they will generally prefer sweet foods from that point onwards. Professor Sheiham says, ‘If you give them lots of sweet food in that window between the ages of two and four, their threshold and their liking for sugar will increase and they’ll want more. Equally, if you give them mildly sweet things, like fruit, their threshold will be lower.’

So what can you do if you’re an adult with a sweet tooth? It is possible to retrain your sweet tooth so that you lower your sweetness threshold. One former sugar addict, Amila, says, ‘My love of chocolate meant that nothing but chocolate could satisfy my sugar cravings. But I’ve now weaned myself off it by eating other sweet foods such as fruit, and where I used to eat bars of chocolate at a time to get the sweetness I needed, I now find that just one piece of chocolate is sweet enough for me. It really has been a case of “retraining” my palate. If you’d told me before that you could do this, I’d never have believed you!’ As you’ll see as you read through this book, stabilizing your blood-sugar levels through a proper diet, and finding sweetness in new places such as fruit, can help you retrain your own palate. This also has implications for preventing your children from loving sugar too much (see Chapters 5 and 6).