The ACOA Trauma Syndrome by Tian Dayton Ph.D

Author:Tian Dayton, Ph.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: concept, trauma, survivors, healing, help in relationship, alcoholics
Publisher: Health Communications, Inc.
Published: 2012-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

A study from Scripps Research Institute headquartered in La Jolla, California, and published in Nature Neuroscience on March 28, 2010, found that junk food, or foods high in white sugar, white flour, and unsaturated fats, can be as addictive to the brain as cocaine, as it causes similar changes in the brain and sets up cravings for more junk food. In lab tests, rats given unlimited access to high-calorie foods like candy bars and cheesecake not only became obese very quickly, they continued gorging even when this binging behavior led to an electric shock. Obese rats that had their junk food replaced with a healthy diet actually stopped eating completely because the reward system in the rats’ brains changed when they became compulsive eaters. “What we’re seeing in our animals is very similar to what you’d see in humans who overindulge,” says lead researcher Paul J. Kenny, an associate professor of molecular therapeutics at the institute. “It seemed that it was okay, from what we could tell, to enjoy snack foods, but if you repeatedly overindulge, that’s where the problem comes in” (­Johnson and Kenny 2010). Repeated indulgence in junk food changes the brain chemistry to want that soothing, oblivious high, or what amounts to self-medicating, so that the brain and body actually become locked into an addictive cycle that is similar to that of a cocaine addict.

Compulsive Combos: Invisible Addictions

One bad choice leads to another. Sugary foods can become a gateway to self-sabotaging food choices that can lead us straight into compulsive eating. ACoAs who don’t want to think of themselves as alcoholics or drug addicts may be unwittingly manipulating their own body chemistry. Foods that contain sugar and white flour that the body immediately converts into sugar, along with a couple of drinks of alcohol that add to and potentate the sugar effect, constitute a “compulsive combo” that can become extremely addictive.

Holistic nutrition counselor Meredith Watkins writes about how food sets up cravings and increases anxiety levels that lead to self-medicating. “The recovering alcoholic who keeps a daily cocktail of caffeine and nicotine coursing through his veins and keeps white pasta and bagels on regular rotation in his diet . . . not surprisingly has alcohol cravings going through the roof. . . . In this case, the sugar from the white flour products acts in his body in the exact same way alcohol does.” And the caffeine he is drinking with the bagel or muffin “is blocking the production of natural serotonin,” his body’s natural mood stabilizer (2012).

In her book The Mood Cure, Julia Ross talks about the chemical action of sugar and alcohol in an alcoholic’s body: “Alcohol acts just like sugar biochemically, only more so. It contains more calories per gram, and it gets into your bloodstream faster. For people whose blood sugar levels tend to be low (of which research states that 95% of alcoholics are hypoglycemic), this can be irresistible” (2002). “This is why those bagels should be verboten to a recovering alcoholic” (Watkins 2012).

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