The sweetest taboo: are you desperately seeking sugar? Here's how you can have your cake—and stay on your diet, too!

Give us candy, cookies, cake, anything with sugar. Lead us off to Pleasure Island--not a TV reality-show locale, but the fictitious one from "Pinocchio." We may be turning into donkeys like Pinocchio and his pals, but we just can't help it. We're hooked on sugar, and willpower doesn't seem to help.

Why do we like sugar so much? We're born that way. "The taste for sweets is seen in infants as early as three days of age," says Keith Ayoob, EdD, RD, associate professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association.

"It's something that's in us," he states. "Most people have a preference for sweetness. When sugar consumption is out of control, it's due to environment, availability or both, Relatively speaking, it's a pretty cheap experience. A quick fix, but not long-lasting. People end up feeling guilty."

sweet rebound

Low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diets don't help our sweet tooth, either. The persistent hunger might just make us more vulnerable when we finally give in to the urge for sweets.

Recent animal research shows a link between sugar intake and dependency (in rats, anyway). As one subhead summed it up: "Denied sugar, bingeing rats suffered withdrawal." The study, published in the June 2002 issue of the journal Obesity Research, involved conditioning rats to a deprivation/bingeing cycle.

Offered nutritionally balanced food plus sugar water after 12 hours without food, the rats gradually increased their sugar intake. Not unlike some humans, they consumed most of their sugar quickly, within the first hour it was available. Even more telling, when these rats were fed their usual diet but without sugar, they experienced teeth chattering, a common sign of withdrawal, the researchers note.

"The implication is that some animals, and some people, can become overly dependent on sweet food, particularly if they periodically stop eating and then binge," says Bart Hoebel, who led the study at Princeton University in New Jersey. Scientists aren't sure how this knowledge may apply to sugar-craving people, "But it does change the way people might look at it," Hoebel remarks. "It puts it in the realm of an addictive disorder rather than a failure of willpower."

bittersweet truth

Are you really addicted to sugar? Technically, probably not, since addiction requires three elements:

1) Increased intake and changes in brain chemistry

2) Upon deprivation, signs of withdrawal and further changes in brain chemistry

3) Craving and relapse after withdrawal is over.

You're not likely to commit a crime to supply your sugar habit, but you may be accustomed to the quick carbohydrates of sugar and seek them first when you're hungry (which may be often if you're trying to diet). But don't throw in the candy wrapper yet. After all, we have lots more control over our actions than do rats. You can work out ways to manage your sugar habits and change the sweet-seeking behaviors that bother you.

"The first step is to be honest with yourself about what's going on with your trigger foods," explains Daniel Bessesen, MD, chief of the endocrinology section at Denver Health Medical Center and associate professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver. "When you binge, what sequence of events triggers it? You might keep a log: Write down what's happening, and ask yourself what you get out of it. After self-monitoring and journaling, devise some reasonable strategies. Saying you'll have none of the trigger foods at all isn't realistic.

"You may crave your trigger food when your menstrual cycle nears or at times of stress, and you might not be able to change those factors," he adds. "But you can change the availability of sweets. You can ask your co-worker to keep the goodies in her office, or your spouse not to bring home candy. If you've been buying big candy bars, perhaps you could switch to a smaller one, if calories are the issue.

"Try a strategy, self-monitor and then reassess," Bessesen advises. "Learn from what happened in the past, What made it not work? We tend to repeat our actions, but if something didn't work in the past, why would you think it will work now?"

sweet strategies

What kind of changes might work? "The answer isn't to eliminate sugar, but to learn how to moderate and manage it," Ayoob points out. "People often get into sugar binges; the largest binges occur when you've been without sugar for a long time. Rather than avoid sugar, build it into your diet occasionally."

You can even enjoy sweets more often. "Figure out how often you want sweets," he suggests. "If it's every day, most women can afford 100-200 calories per day, about 10% of their daily average. An ounce of chocolate has 150 calories and up. If that's your choice, that's the splurge for the day."