Number of receptors

[u/Recent_Illustrator89]

I recently saw a ted talk, and in it, they claimed that the more sugar you eat, the more dopamine is released, and then your brain responds by developing more dopamine receptors

Thus you need more sugar to get the same fix

Is this true?

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[u/fantasiaflyer]

To a point yes, just like any drug (cocaine very similarly) you can get "addicted" to sugar and it has diminishing returns on your pleasure if you over endulge (And just fyi, you actually develop less dopamine receptors, not more). It's actually one of the few reasons we have a pleasure circuit in the first place - to reward high calorie food so we know to keep eating it. This is why some people will be much more irritated if they don't have their daily sugar (eg soda), as they're having a mild withdrawal from their body's dependence on their excessive sugar intake.

Drugs do the same thing but to a much, much higher degree.

[u/Recent_Illustrator89 → u/fantasiaflyer]

Whoa interesting.

I guess with less dopamine receptors, your body gets less pleasure, so eating you just keep pounding sugar (or whatever your drug of choice is) and it does less and less for you.

And the process of getting back to normal probably takes months and months of significantly less sugar, would that be correct?

[u/fantasiaflyer → u/Recent_Illustrator89]

Sorry I missed this reply.

That's exactly correct and why addiction is such an insidious and self-fulfilling disease. You fry your body's normal ability to feel joy and pleasure because you are synthetically overloading the system and the body's response is to make a new "normal" baseline that is used to a high amount of dopamine.

So this means addicts won't get as much joy from healthy activities like socializing, being outside, achieving their goals etc because the dopamine response is relatively less than what their brain is used to (from either drugs or high sugar). So the brain wants to feel good, knows that it can only feel good from drug/sugar, and only wants drug/sugar and doesn't consider long-term consequences (a thing our brains are unfortunately very poor at considering in general)

[u/akreddy315]

also known as substance tolerance/substrate-receptor desensitization.