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high-calorie and low-calorie foods. The women’s brains were scanned twice as they viewed images of cookies, cakes, burgers, and fruits and vegetables. After seeing all the images, they were asked to rate their hunger as well as their desire for sweet or savory foods.
    Halfway through the scans, the women drank 50 grams of glucose, which is similar to drinking a can of sugary soda. In a separate instance, they drank 50 grams of fructose.
    The researchers had hypothesized that the reward areas in the women’s brains would be activated as they looked at the pictures of the high-calorie foods—and they were right. “What we didn’t expect was that consuming the glucose and fructose would increase their hunger and desire for savory foods,” said the study’s principal investigator, Kathleen Page, MD. And fructose resulted in more intense cravings and hunger among the women than glucose. “This stimulation of the brain’s reward areas may contribute to overeating and obesity, and has important public health implications,” she said.
    As you’ll learn, research is pointing to fructose, in particular, as a real dietary menace and appetite-gooser. In a study of 20 healthy people published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, Yale researchers looked for appetite-related changes in bloodflow in the hypothalamic region of their brains after they ingested either glucose or fructose. The study’s findings suggested that glucose may reduce blood flow in parts of the brain that govern appetite, which may help inhibit the desire to eat. That wasn’t so for fructose, according to the findings.
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THE EMOTIONAL CONNECTION
    We love sweets. Our taste buds, our eyes, our emotions crave the delightful reward of sugar. We love the taste, the way it makes us feel, and the emotional connection that sweets provide: comforting warm fuzzies at the end of a long day. From time to time, we all succumb to sugar’s sweet but empty promise: relief. Horrendous day at the office? Ice cream. Crushing worries about your aging mom or slacker teen? Ice cream. Feeling fat and friendless? You get the idea.
    Eating in response to emotions as varied as boredom, loneliness, or anxiety—what’s called
emotional eating
—is real. I told you about my stress-induced binges on sugar as a college student. Those episodes didn’t lead to much weight gain. The drama around food played out in my head rather than on my body. Back then, I honestly thought those candy bars would help me power through final exams. Now I know that sugar had its hooks in me, emotionally speaking. I was lucky. Those hooks only “pulled” when I was under stress. But for some people (maybe you), the dig of those hooks is constant; they struggle with cravings every day.
    More than one person on our test panel described the connection to sugar as feeling like addiction. One told me she’d find herself leaving work in the middle of the day to drive to the corner pharmacy for chocolate, thinking, “What am I doing?” Another described himself as obsessed with sugary foods—“I feel like I spend my whole day thinking about sugar.”
    In fact, in a study of 40 women of varying body sizes (some lean, some overweight) published in the
Archives of General Psychiatry
, those who scored higher on a scientifically designed food-addiction scale showed more activity in the parts of the brain associated with drug and alcohol addiction when they were shown pictures of chocolate milkshakes.
    One sign of using sugar to manage emotions is that responding to a sugar craving—eating, say, chocolate or ice cream to satisfy it—doesn’t alleviate it. Rather, trying to satisfy the craving prompts a desire for more.
    Memory plays a key role in the link between sugar and feelings. Many of the sugary foods we love and crave transport us back to times when we felt loved and cared for. Maybe fresh-from-the-oven cookies remind you of your beloved Nana. Perhaps you unwind with a bowl of