Designing the Program
Kathleen DesMaisons, Ph.D.
When I was looking for answers to why my food program worked so well, I started asking questions. Lots and lots of questions. Yes, there were striking patterns in the stories. And then I went to the scientific literature. I looked in many different places: alcoholism,
nutrition, pharmacology, psychology, endocrinology and psychiatry. I didn't have a “field” to describe what I was thinking, so I poked around in everyone else's. I turned up some intriguing findings. There seemed to be three core issues which fit what I was seeing in the clients: volatile blood sugar reactions (known as carbohydrate sensitivity), low levels of the brain chemical serotonin, and low levels of the brain chemical beta-endorphin. When I laid out the symptoms and behaviors associated
with these, I was floored at how closely they matched the patterns I saw in my clients and myself.
I imagine a three-legged stool with blood sugar (BS), serotonin (5HT) and beta-endorphin (BE) acting as each leg. If there were a deficit in any or all of the Legs, the stool would be off balance and wouldn't work well. Sugar sensitivity is
the name I picked for the top of the stool. Each person seemed to have different deficits in each leg of the stool. Sugar sensitive people with low levels of serotonin would be depressed and impulsive, those with deficits in blood sugar would be volatile and moody, and people with low beta endorphin would have low self esteem, feel socially isolated and have a very low tolerance for painful situations. People with deficits in more than one area would take on those expanded
symptoms.
There were powerful correlates with dietary habits as well. The BS's would tend to skip meals, forget breakfast and eat erratically. They would fall off the cliff and grab anything in desperation. The 5HT's would be drawn to bread and pasta, comfort foods. They tended to be binge eaters or compulsive eaters and often struggled with
their weight. The BE's were hard line sugar and alcohol lovers. These were the ones who played with the edge, flirting with danger and squeaking by. They were the miracle workers who pushed deadlines and squeaked by.
And there were thousands and thousands who were all three. My own clients were an incredible mix of all three. Highly
complex, dramatic, creative, smart, intuitive, sensitive, warm and caring. And underneath, always in huge pain because they felt powerless to “just say no.”
I created a nutritional intervention to treat sugar sensitivity. We called it a food plan. It was simple, very straightforward and easy to understand. Eat regularly, have protein
with every meal. Eat brown things instead of white things, go off of sugar and have a potato before bed. Very simple, yet profoundly elegant and scientifically intentional. The food plan could smooth out the volatility of the blood sugar response, raise the serotonin levels, and stop the beta endorphin priming and enhance beta endorphin functioning. The same simple program covered all the sugar sensitive bases. And because the program was individually tailored, it reinforced positive behavioral
changes.
As people started to talk with one another, we discovered that the very same themes were indeed constant for almost everyone. While sugar sensitivity seems to be a reasonable explanation for why we behave the way we do, we can't just go to PubMed, put in “sugar sensitivity” and find hundreds or thousands of citations telling us
all about our unique bodies and behaviors. But the story is there, encoded in unexpected places and in unexpected ways. If we listen and watch our own stories, we can go back to the literature and better understand the why of what we are living.
The beta-endorphin story first came from the work of Dr. Christine Gianoulakis at McGill
University. She noticed that two different strains of mice responded to the effects of alcohol in very different ways. The C57GL/6 strain of mice had a far more potent reaction to drinking than their “dry” brothers and sisters, the DBA/2 mice. Dr. Gianoulakis and her colleagues had worked with these mice for a long time in many studies. They discovered that the C57's and the DBA's have very different levels of beta-endorphin. The C57's are born with much lower levels of BE. To compensate for
this, their brains increase the number of BE receptor sites, called upregulation, which caused a bigger response to things which evoke beta-endorphin. Alcohol and sugar both evoke a beta endorphin response. The C57's can be thought of as mice waiting to be alcoholic. I would call them sugar sensitive mice.
Dr. Gianoulakis extended her
study to people and discovered a whole group of people who were genetically predisposed to alcohol addiction. The children and grandchildren of alcoholics seem to be the human equivalent of the C57 mice. They were predisposed to abusing alcohol and becoming addicted to it. I have found that this same group tends to be very drawn to the addictive use of sugars and white flour products. As Dr. Gianoulakis was publishing her work, a number of other scientists were noticing that the C57's also
preferred the taste of sweet things far more than their buds, the DBAs. Some of them found that sucrose quieted pain. Others discovered that not only does sucrose quiet physical pain, but also it quiets the pain of loss or social isolation. The C57's (the sugar sensitive mice) and the DBA (the normal mice) had very different responses to sugars and alcohol.
Dr. Elliott Blass, then at Cornell, wanted to understand how this happened. How could sugar act like a drug. He did some experiments and showed that sucrose cut physical and emotional pain by evoking the brain's own beta-endorphin. Beta-endorphin is the body's natural painkiller. Sucrose acts like an opioid drug such as morphine or heroin. Not as intensely, but on the same beta-endorphin system. The C57s have a 35 times more powerful reaction to morphine than do the DBAs.
Think of that. Insert sugar in the place of morphine, and you will begin to see why some body and brain types seek it, love it and get addicted to it. The little C57's mice give us a lot of ideas about why we behave the way we do.
The scientists have not started thinking of the C57's as sugar sensitive, but those of us who are doing this
program can suggest this leap from the C57 profile to the people profile. The “match” is extraordinary. If we start thinking of ourselves as little C57 mice, we can have LOTS of clues about why we act the way we do. And we can start understanding why our DBA friends cannot in any way understand why we keeping going back when they are able to just say no. As we continue this discussion, let's stop for a moment and take one cautionary note. Scientists do not trash the little C57s. Nor do they laud
the DBA's. They simply know that they are two very distinct strains with different body chemistries. If they wish to look at the effect of a given intervention and want to see the differences in different body types, they order both kinds of mice. Their “dispassion” about types of mice can comfort us in our journey to healing.
So, we can
work on taking the negative judgment and shame off of the C57 way of life. Our first step is understanding. As we get how this works, we can start making choices for healing.
