For decades parents, teachers and school administrators have loudly claimed sugar creates bad behavior like bullying and schoolyard violence. Scientists have just as loudly insisted the evidence shows they’re wrong. Until now. New work shows sugar overstimulates the same neuroendocrine pathways addicting us to alcohol, cocaine and the people with whom we fall in love. It reveals overstimulating these pathways repeatedly is associated with violent behavior. And it demonstrates that over consumption of sugar in childhood correlates with addictive behavior in adulthood. Taken together, the new evidence suggests that sugar may be the first gateway drug.
Sugar can apparently also set the neuroendocrine stage for all the behaviors classically associated with drug addiction, including violent behavior. Duane Law’s forthcoming book, Before Meds / After Meds: Complementary and Alternative Medicine for Anxiety and Depression details how modern food drives some of us mad. Scheduled to be released this fall, it gives step-by-step instructions as to how to recognize when the foods we eat may be affecting our moods and judgment. It also explains what any of us can do about it with powerful tools available in any good health food store.
The book also condenses an emerging body of scientific opinion suggesting that conventional research models are biased. By elevating randomized controlled trials (RCT) to the “gold standard” of medical evidence, these models tip the evidentiary playing field away from the complex, highly individualized interventions characteristic of best-practice alternative medicine, and towards less-complex pharmaceutical drug protocols. This impedes our access to a wide range of powerful, simple, inexpensive, time-tested and natural self-help tools we can use to reduce our dependency on drugs.
Law knows first hand the damage sugar can do. “I grew up in a home where sugar was everywhere and all the time” he says. “I was a very angry kid, and I shudder sometimes when I think about all the ways I expressed that.” Isolated, bullied, anxious and depressed, the young Law drew back from life, full of hate.
“Take a highly intelligent oversensitive kid, fill him full of sugar … when he starts acting strange bully him relentlessly and every now and then one of them’ll blow up. Fortunately for me and my school, I found Alan Watts before I found Smith & Wesson.” An orthomolecular psychiatrist took Law off all refined carbohydrates and he began to recover. “I started to feel really, good, better than I’d ever felt in my life. I couldn’t believe something everyone thought was so innocent could have had such an extremely negative effect on me.” Law wondered what else had been hidden.
Law became one of the earliest acupuncturists licensed in the US. An Integrative Medicine pioneer, he was the first acupuncturist on staff at Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic and Director of Integrative Medicine for Clinica Medica San Miguel. He teaches continuing education classes for mental health therapists. Duane Law is an acupuncturist, naturopath, writer and speaker providing health-enhancing, education-based makeover programs for the seriously committed. His telemedicine-based practice consults with clients all over the world. – Press Report Duane Law.
