Why "sugar is bad" misses the real story, and what to do instead

I want to start with something that might feel counterintuitive if you’ve spent years fighting your relationship with sugar: your brain was designed to seek it out. Not as a flaw. Not as a moral failing. As one of the most intelligent systems your body has.

Your brain runs on glucose. The cells that do all the thinking, all the feeling, all the moving of your body — they need sugar the way a fire needs wood. They burn through it constantly. So your body developed something elegant: dedicated wiring whose only job is to find sweet things, notice them, and pull you toward more of them. This isn’t a glitch. This is your biology working exactly as it was designed to work.

So when you find yourself craving something sweet at the end of a long day, or after intense focus, or in the middle of grief, or after a difficult conversation — you’re not broken. You’re hardwired.

The question isn’t why do I want sweet things. The question is: what are we actually being handed when we go looking for them?

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Two pulls toward sugar — and one of them you can’t even feel

I recently watched a Huberman Lab Essentials episode where Andrew Huberman walks through the science of why we crave sugar. He’s careful to note he’s pulling together the work of other researchers — including Dr. Diego Bohórquez at Duke, whose lab discovered something that changes how we should think about food entirely.

There are two parallel pulls driving sugar-seeking. Most people only know about one.

The first pull is the one you can feel. Sweet receptors on your tongue register taste, send signals to the parts of your brain that handle reward, release dopamine, and pull you toward more of whatever just tasted sweet. This is the pull most "willpower" approaches try to interrupt. Just don’t eat the cookie. Just have one. Just resist.

The second pull is the one nobody told you about. There are specialized cells in your gut — Bohórquez’s lab calls them neuropod cells — that detect sugar’s presence directly. No taste involved at all. They send a signal up to the brain that triggers the same dopamine release. And this whole thing happens completely below your awareness.

Why does this matter? Because hidden sugars in savory foods activate this second pull without you ever registering sweetness. You eat a sauce that’s marketed as healthy, a packaged meal, a granola bar. Your gut quietly notices the sugar. Your brain quietly fires the pull-toward-more signal. You can’t taste it. You can’t feel it. You can’t reason your way out of it.

You walk away wanting more food. Not because you have no self-control. Because your gut just told your brain there was sugar present, and your brain is doing exactly what it was built to do.

This is why willpower so often fails. You’re not fighting one pull. You’re fighting two — and one of them you can’t even feel.

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The pivot: it’s not "sugar is bad"

Here’s where I want to slow down, because this is where things start to shift for the people I work with.

The cultural conversation about sugar tends to land in one of two places. Sugar is poison, eliminate it entirely. Or: moderation, just have a little. Both of these miss what’s actually happening.

Sugar — meaning glucose — isn’t bad. Your brain literally cannot function without it. Whole fruits, vegetables, whole grains — real food in its natural form delivers sugar to a body that needs it, wrapped in fiber and other things that slow everything down and let your body register enough.

The problem isn’t sugar. The problem is what the food industry has built to exploit your wiring without giving your body what it’s actually asking for.

I call these things NF — Not Food.

The ultra-processed products engineered to hit your sweet receptors and your gut cells and your reward system all at once, stripped of fiber, stripped of fat, stripped of anything that would tell your body "okay, that’s enough now." They’re not designed to nourish you. They’re designed to keep you wanting more. And they do their job extraordinarily well.

I want to say something about the language here, because I’ve thought about this a lot. Some recovery frameworks use the phrase "Not My Food" — meaning, this is something I personally cannot have. I understand the intent, but for me and for many of the people I work with, that phrase activates rebellion and grief. Why can’t I have what other people have? What’s wrong with me that I can’t eat this in moderation? I’m broken.

Not Food is different. It’s not a statement about you. It’s a statement about the substance.

That cookie engineered with eleven kinds of sweetener, three industrial oils, and a shelf life of two years isn’t food I’m being deprived of. It’s not food at all. It’s a product designed to override the systems that would otherwise tell my body when to stop. Recognizing it as NF isn’t deprivation. It’s discernment.

This single shift — from I can’t have it to that isn’t actually food — moves you out of the rebellion-and-grief loop and into a place where your nervous system can actually rest.

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Moving toward whole-food sugar

So what do you do with wiring that’s working as designed in a food environment that’s working against you?

You give your body what it’s actually asking for.

Your brain wants sugar. Whole foods deliver it — wrapped up in fiber that slows the rise, fat that softens the pull, and the natural signals that tell your body "we’re good now."

Whole foods — fruits, vegetables, whole grains, in whatever form your body has come to recognize as nourishing — these aren’t compromises. These are your wiring being met by foods that match what it was designed for.

Andrew Huberman makes this point in the episode — combining fiber with sweet foods softens both the blood sugar rise and the wanting signal. It’s why eating fruit whole feels different than drinking the juice. The matrix matters. What the sweet thing arrives with changes how your body responds to it.

This isn’t about restriction. This is about giving your body a partner instead of an adversary.

• • •

The deeper layer: the food was always doing a job

If you’ve been struggling with food for any length of time, you already know that ultra-processed substances leave you hungrier than when you started. You’ve felt it a thousand times. That’s not the layer I want to leave you on.

Here’s the layer underneath: the food was always doing a job.

You weren’t reaching for the cookie at the end of a long day because you couldn’t tell it wasn’t real food. You were reaching for the cookie because something inside you was activated — loneliness, exhaustion, anxiety, a feeling without a name — and the cookie was the fastest, most reliable answer your nervous system had on file.

That isn’t weakness. That’s intelligence. Your body found something that worked, and your wiring got very good at remembering it.

The substances are doing real work. They’re soothing real activation. They’re solving real problems — for forty-five minutes at a time, before the crash and the renewed craving and the shame loop start the cycle again.

So when I talk about moving toward whole-food sugar, I’m not asking you to just notice the difference between NF and food. You already notice it. You’ve noticed it for years.

What I’m pointing at is something quieter. What was the food doing for you, just before you reached for it? What was it solving? What was it soothing? What was activated in you that needed an answer, and what would it look like to start meeting that activation with something other than the substance the food industry handed you?

That’s the real work. Not the food itself. The thing the food has been answering for decades.

You were never broken. You were biological. And your biology has been faithfully solving a problem this whole time — with the most reliable tool it had. Imagine what becomes possible when you start handing it better tools.

• • •

With love and light,

Sonja

If you want to understand more about why food patterns aren’t moral failings but intelligent biological adaptations, my book Thinking Outside the Box: A Revolutionary Approach to Food Dysfunction walks through the full picture. Use code REFRAME at checkout. Or take the quiz to find out which patterns are running underneath your relationship with food.