- The Neuroscience of False Rewards
- The Physiology and Psychology of Compulsive Eating
- From Evolutionary Advantage to Modern Trap
The Neuroscience of False Rewards
In behavioral psychology, a reward is defined as any stimulus that increases the likelihood of repeating a behavior by generating feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, or relief. However, rewards fall into two distinct categories that produce vastly different long-term outcomes. Positive rewards build healthy behaviors like exercise or learning new skills, while negative rewards temporarily deceive the brain through mechanisms like consuming sugar to escape stress.
The only reliable way to distinguish between these types is examining long-term consequences rather than immediate sensations. When we consume sugar, our brain releases dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, creating a false sense of achievement and deservingness. This mechanism evolved to help our ancestors survive, but modern food industries exploit it to create disguised addiction cycles wrapped in the appealing package of “deserved rewards.”
Remarkably, sugar triggers the same responses in the brain’s reward center as nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. Laboratory studies demonstrate that rats consistently prefer sugar water over cocaine, even when already addicted to the latter, and they show similar preference over heroin, though this choice proves more difficult to make. This reveals the genuine addictive power of sugar and its profound impact on the brain’s reward pathways.
The individual begins rationalizing harmful behavior as “rewarding themselves” while actually destroying their metabolic health gradually. This self-deception operates at an unconscious level, where the person believes they’re making autonomous choices while actually being driven by disrupted chemical signals throughout their body.
The Physiology and Psychology of Compulsive Eating
Compulsive eating, scientifically speaking, represents a behavioral eating disorder characterized by consuming large quantities of food in short periods while losing control over the eating process. From a physiological standpoint, we can identify someone with this condition through leptin resistance (the satiety hormone) and elevated ghrelin levels (the hunger hormone) even after eating, alongside irregular blood sugar signaling.
Additionally, these individuals show disrupted secretion of intestinal hormones like GLP-1 and CCK, which are responsible for sending fullness signals to the brain. The normal insulin range during fasting should be between 2 to 25 micro international units per ml, and after meals shouldn’t exceed 49 micro international units per ml.
Insulin rises primarily when consuming simple carbohydrates and refined sugars, as these foods cause sharp increases in blood glucose. The pancreas responds by secreting insulin, which signals cells, particularly muscle cells, to absorb glucose and use it as energy. The danger of elevated insulin lies in its negative effect on satiety signals in the brain, suppressing them and making a person feel hungry even after consuming adequate food.
Chronic insulin elevation disrupts the balance of appetite-regulating hormones like leptin and ghrelin, making the brain unable to receive fullness signals and continuing to demand more food. The problem becomes more complex when elevated insulin causes blood sugar to drop below normal levels, prompting the brain to send urgent signals demanding glucose-containing food to restore balance.
However, as soon as the person consumes sugar-rich food again, glucose levels spike sharply, followed by another large insulin release, leading to another sugar crash. This cycle continues, and over time, with repeated exposure to this exhausting pattern, body cells begin resisting insulin, not responding effectively to it. This forces the pancreas to secrete more insulin to force glucose into cells, beginning insulin resistance, which represents the first step toward more serious metabolic disorders like obesity, fatty liver, and type 2 diabetes.
Psychologically, compulsive eating strongly correlates with negative emotional states like anxiety, depression, and stress, where the brain uses food as an escape mechanism from emotional pain. This occurs because consuming sugars and simple carbohydrates temporarily triggers dopamine and serotonin release, creating an illusion of improved mood. However, this temporary effect is followed by crashes in both blood sugar and mood levels, driving the person to repeat the behavior in an endless cycle of emotional eating disguised as “psychological comfort.”
From Evolutionary Advantage to Modern Trap
Understanding this phenomenon requires examining it through an evolutionary lens. Humans weren’t designed for an environment of constant abundance but rather for a reality characterized by variation, tension between scarcity and plenty, between need and surprise. In this context, “sweet” or “fatty” foods weren’t regular rewards or repeated habits but rare events, more like environmental “windfalls” requiring immediate exploitation.
Therefore, ancient humans developed an instinctive response to such moments: to eat immediately and voraciously when the opportunity arose. The body incorporated this understanding into its biological system. Insulin, as an internal messenger of wisdom, wasn’t just a sugar regulator but a guardian of appetite rhythm, protecting humans from excess or stimulating them when needed. However, today it no longer operates in the same original context.
In the modern world of abundance, particularly with available sugars and refined starches, the equation has become disrupted. These foods no longer appear as surprises but have become habits. Here, insulin begins to rebel. Chronic excess leads to insulin resistance, making the body unable to read satiety signals correctly, resulting in amplified desire and diminished satisfaction.
Worse still is the conceptual reversal: humans now consider these foods “rewards,” while in their original constitution, they were never meant to be such. The human mind, especially under dopamine’s influence, translates sugar and fats into moments of joy but forgets that these are merely misleading signals in a distorted context.
As noted in “The Case Against Sugar,” when blood glucose levels rise, the pancreas secretes insulin in response, which signals muscle cells to absorb and burn more glucose while also signaling fat cells to absorb and retain fats. Only when the blood sugar spike begins to recede do insulin levels also decrease, allowing fat cells to release their stored fuel into circulation as fatty acids that muscle cells and organs burn instead of glucose.
The biological factor necessary for extracting fats from fat cells and using them as fuel, as Yalow and Berson noted in 1965, is “the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency.” These discoveries about insulin’s various functions led them to describe it as the most “lipogenic” hormone, meaning fat-forming. This signal must be lowered or significantly suppressed for fat cells to release their stored fats for the body to use as fuel.
This modern transformation represents a shift from need-based eating to behavioral addiction. In the past, food was linked to survival, but now it has become a means of entertainment and anxiety relief. French sociologist Jean Baudrillard discussed consumer society’s reshaping of human needs into symbolic forms, where luxury foods or sweets become expressions of social status or identity.
Thus, eating no longer responds solely to biological needs but has become a tool for escaping pressures and a temporary treatment for negative emotions, as well as a marker of sophistication and wealth. The contemporary human consumption pattern, as nutrition expert John Yudkin wrote in 1963 about England, reveals that “we now consume in two weeks the amount of sugar our ancestors consumed 200 years ago in an entire year. Sugar provides about 20% of our total caloric intake and nearly half our carbohydrate consumption.”
In this sense, compulsive eating isn’t a failure of willpower but a loss of the existential compass that once understood when eating meant survival and when it became a burden. Hunger is no longer real but artificial, fed by a confused nervous system and a lifestyle disconnected from original wisdom. When external signals are repeatedly imposed on the body, such as food advertising and excess sugar, natural satiety systems begin to decline, similar to a software system receiving constant wrong signals and losing its ability to distinguish between “what it needs” and “what’s imposed on it.”
Here, compulsive eating becomes not weakness of will but a malfunction in the body and mind’s internal sensing system. The person develops “emotional hunger” or “existential hunger,” a constant feeling of deficiency despite physical fullness. These advertisements plant messages about the benefits of certain foods as rewards, like “quench your thirst by drinking Coca-Cola.”
The ultimate deception lies in how all this occurs at an unconscious level. The individual thinks they’re controlling their decisions while actually being led by a series of disrupted chemical signals. The body sends false hunger signals, the brain interprets them as demands for rewards, and the person convinces themselves they “deserve” that piece of candy while actually feeding a self-perpetuating addictive cycle that weakens self-control and drives them toward insulin resistance and chronic metabolic disorders.
As one researcher noted, determining what constitutes “excessive amounts” ultimately becomes a personal decision, just as we all decide as adults what level of alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes we’ll consume. The evidence suggests we should consider sugar a highly toxic substance and make informed decisions about balancing potential risks and benefits.
However, to understand those benefits, it’s helpful to see what life looks like without sugar. Former smokers will tell you it was impossible for them to comprehend, intellectually or emotionally, what life would be like without cigarettes until they quit, and that it was a continuous struggle for weeks, months, or even years. Then one day, they reached a point where they couldn’t imagine smoking a cigarette or understand why they smoked in the first place, let alone consider it desirable. A similar experience likely holds true for sugar, but until we try living without it and maintain that effort for more than just days or a few weeks, we’ll never truly know.
The path forward requires recognizing that controlling the relationship between humans and their needs doesn’t just mean rationing food but restoring the original meaning of rewards and understanding that happiness was never found in repetition but in appreciation and rarity. Returning to our natural state is the only way to escape the illusion of continuous satisfaction.
The Case Against Sugar
The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes is a powerful book that uncovers the hidden dangers of sugar in our modern diet. It explains how sugar has silently become one of the most harmful substances in everyday foods, shaping our biology, influencing our choices, and fueling today’s health crises.
When blood sugar (glucose) rises, the pancreas releases insulin. This hormone signals muscle cells to absorb and burn more glucose, while fat cells are instructed to store fat. Only when glucose levels drop does insulin decrease, allowing fat cells to release their stored fuel in the form of fatty acids, which the muscles and organs then burn for energy. In short, insulin is the key regulator: when it is high, fat stays locked in storage; when it is low, fat can be used as fuel. As early researchers noted, insulin is the most “fattening” hormone in the body.
Experiments show how powerful sugar’s pull can be. Rats given sweetened water will often prefer it over cocaine, and even heroin—showing how addictive sugar can truly be.
This overconsumption is not new. As nutrition expert John Yudkin noted back in 1963, “We now consume in just two weeks the same amount of sugar our ancestors ate in an entire year two centuries ago.” By then, sugar was already making up around 20% of daily calories in England, and nearly half of all carbohydrate intake.
So the question becomes: can we openly say that people eat too much sugar? Should parents be told to keep their children away from it, even if science hasn’t linked it to one single disease beyond doubt? As Columbia University’s Joan Gussow said in 1975, we know that replacing sugar with complex carbs would make our diets far healthier.
In the end, the definition of “too much” is personal, just as with alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes. But the evidence is strong enough to suggest that sugar is toxic—and that life without it could feel as freeing as life without smoking once did. Many ex-smokers say they couldn’t imagine life without cigarettes until they finally quit—then one day, they couldn’t imagine why they ever smoked at all. The same may be true for sugar, but we will never know until we try.
“If sugar is as bad as I argue it is, then the message is simple: eat less of it. A lot less.”
