Michael Winterdahl set out, in his own words, “to kill a myth.”

When the associate professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University in Denmark served as the lead author in a study using Göttingen minipigs and sugar, he didn’t really do so with an open mind. He admitted to Medical News Today’s Ana Sandoiu that he did so to refute the notion that what’s often referred to as table sugar - the combination of glucose and fructose extracted from sugar cane and sugar beets and technically called sucrose - affects the brain in a way that creates addictive behavior.

The study’s results, however, indicated that the myth did not deserve to die. So Winterdahl did what so many people in a similar situation choose not to do. He recognized he was wrong and changed his mind.

The world needs more people like Michael Winterdahl.

In the paper published in the November 2019 issue of Scientific Research, he writes, “[Our] results clearly demonstrate that sucrose affects reward mechanisms in a manner similar to that of drugs of abuse” and to a degree that leads to “overconsumption and eventual obesity.”

If you’re wondering why the well-known Connecticut College study in 2013 that showed rats got hooked on Oreos as easily as cocaine or morphine was not proof enough for Winterdahl, his paper provides that explanation. “Although rats have a ‘sweet tooth,’ their homeostatic mechanisms important to weight gain, metabolism, and type of fat accumulation, differ significantly from those of humans.” Göttingen minipigs, though, have “well-defined subcortical and prefrontal cortical regions [that] enable a more direct translation to human brain function.”

So Winterdahl and his cohorts gave seven female Göttingen minipigs access to sugar water for one hour a day for 12 days straight. A day afterwards, they gave the seven pigs and a control group of five the same brain scan that they all received prior to the study.

“After just 12 days of sugar intake,” Winterdahl told Sandoiu, “we could see major changes in the brain’s dopamine and opioid systems. In fact, the opioid system, which is that part of the brain’s chemistry that is associated with well-being and pleasure, was already activated after the very first intake.”

To better appreciate the gravity of these results, consider the role of dopamine in your body.

In a summation of a 2106 study done at the University of Vienna, Science Daily dubs dopamine “the happy hormone” because “it is responsible for our experiencing happiness” and notes that “adrenaline is a close relative.” Prior to a 2016 conference that featured dopamine research, Harald Sitte of MedUni Vienna’s Institute of Pharmacology in Vienna, Austria, said, “[It’s] the reason why a lot of people are constantly seeking to satisfy their cravings.”

Sitte’s use of “constantly seeking” may have been based somewhat on a study published by Diabetes Care in 2013 - one that would’ve made Pavlov proud and his dogs bark out loud. It found that the dopamine and opioid systems in obese individuals get activated not only by the consumption of sugary food but also by the mere anticipation of it.

In other words, put the obese in an environment associated with the consumption of sugary food and willpower goes out the window.

Combine all the findings in the aforementioned studies, and it’s easy to understand why some people can’t resist sugary foods despite the fact they know they are unhealthy. So whether you’re obese or at a healthy weight, a consistent exerciser or a slug on a sofa, you need to be as open-minded as Michael Winterdahl when you ask yourself “Have I become hooked on sugar?”

And while constructing an answer, consider sugar sources beyond beverages. Currently, three out of every four packaged foods contains added sugars, so if you tend not to cook for yourself but subsist on take-out or highly processed grocery store items, you could be ingesting far more sugar than you may imagine.

A study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published in 2015 by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, for instance, assessed the shopping patterns of more than 150,000 households and found that 63 percent of the total calories purchased come from highly processed foods. While all of the calories in highly processed foods are not sugars, a significant percentage are.

Moreover, the refined grains so often a part of highly processed foods are processed by your body in the same manner as sugar. Other studies have found the fat so often added to highly processed foods actually increases the addictive quality of sugar.

Research using 206 subjects from four different countries and published by Cell Metabolism in 2018 found that the combination of simple carbohydrates (predominantly added sugars and processed grains) with fat stimulated the brain’s reward system even more intensely than just simple carbs. In fact, the subjects’ brains were stimulated even more by the fat-and-bad-carb combo than when they ate whatever food they personally selected as their favorite.