A few weeks ago, I mentioned my intention to read Potatoes not Prozac again. I got sidetracked by a sick pet and things going on in my husband's family but now I am resuming.

In the introduction, Kathleen talks about science versus experience. Scientists look at little tiny pieces of a puzzle, in controlled situations where they look at just one variable at a time, and then make little changes to test their theories. I can relate to this, because I used to do computer programming, and I would make just one tiny change at a time when I was trying to solve a problem, instead of making a lot of changes at once and seeing if it worked. The scientists are just looking at one little area, so the people studying addiction don't read the nutrition studies, and the people studying nutrition don't read the addiction literature etc. I picture the scientists in little isolated silos doing their experiments.

Kathleen came from a clinical background, working with patients who were struggling with addiction. People's problems and lives aren't simple and you can't control all the variables. Kathleen read studies in a variety of different fields and based on her experience with addicts and what she read in the literature, she came up with the theory of sugar sensitivity. (The following is quoted from the book.)
• There is an inherited biochemical condition called sugar sensitivity that has predictable and specific effects on the brain and on a person’s behavior. What foods a sugar-sensitive person eats and when they eat them will affect them profoundly.
• Sugar has the same pain-killing and euphoria-stimulating effect in the human body as opioid drugs do. These drug effects of sugar are heightened in sugar-sensitive people. Sugar addiction, like drug addiction, is real and can open the gate to other addictions.
• Changing what a sugar-sensitive person eats and when they eat it can have a profound effect on their well-being and behavior.

Even though there is no scientific study that proves this theory (just bits and pieces but not the whole thing together) I certainly believe it is true, based on my experience and other people's experiences. Even if you are brand new and haven't experienced how things change when you change your eating, parts of this theory probably make sense to you, based on your own experience.

My favorite part of this section was how Kathleen took information from many different areas and synthesized them into a theory. It kind of reminds me of how when I was in college and was writing multiple final papers on different topics, in the middle of the process I'd find some connection between them even though they had started out seeming totally unrelated, although I never found anything like this, and of course her process was intentional.

Allison