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Sugar
In the same vein, salt.
Try to stay under the daily recommended amount of 2500mg of sodium and see how limited your food options are.
Everything is loaded with salt now. Especially fast food. For example, my previous go-to meal at Zaxby's (the boneless wings and things plate) is over 4000mg of sodium for one meal. Add on a 1300mg sausage, egg, and cheese mcgriddle and a fried rice with soy sauce for dinner and I had several days worth of sodium without totally blowing my calorie budget.
You're not supposed to eat any of those things on any regular basis. Those are def cheat meals to eat sparingly when you've planned to go a little crazy with your diet
Fried rice is not a cheat meal and a lot of people in the world eat it daily.
Fried rice? Not so much. Plain White rice, yes.
That isn't addiction though, that's lack of options. If you cut out sugar or sodium from your diet you probably aren't going to go through withdrawal. Unless you're meaning more of a psychological addiction.
That's a fair point. But there is definitely a "tolerance" you build up and can be reset. After being on a low sodium diet, anything like what I mentioned before is almost inedibly salty.
Add in processed wheat flour and processed fats
All known as 'White Death' .... foods we are all easily addicted to and have little to no nutritional value.
I'm a filthy vegan and former tobacco smoker that doesn't indulge in sweets. I'm scared to actually calculate my salt intake as I over season everything I eat. For a while I thought I was being healthy not using table salt on anything, until I realized hot sauce and tamari are essentially liquid sodium.
Yep. My favorite hot sauce has 1200mg of sodium per two tablespoons... And I would drench my food in that shit.
Same with soy sauce. Each of those little packets you get from your favorite Chinese place is probably at least 300mg of sodium.
Yeah I got through a... whatever, a giant jug of Frank's hot sauce, I guess half a gallon. Every time I used it I'd visibly bloat up from the sodium, but was probably using a quarter cup minimum every time.
Tried my best to use USA measurements for American people's benefit. The jug was >2 litres and we're talking 60ml a pop, absolute minimum. Apparently that's five grams of salt, nearly 2000mg sodium. Wow.
You can't even buy soup in the grocery store because it's all 33% sodium
Canned soup is especially bad about sodium, and they're sneaky about it. They'll say that each can has two servings and each serving is like 800mg of sodium.
Reminds me of my favorite food, the KFC Double Down. That bad boy had so much sodium they had to take it off the permanent menu (much to my salt-loving dismay) due to the number of warnings about its salt and fat content.
Still pissed that my local KFC shut down and that I missed the month that it was brought back for (only saw the commercial for it 3 days before it ended when the nearest KFC was like an hour or so away).
2500mg is also just not a lot of sodium. 2000 calories is also a recommended daily amount but it's far too low for a lot of people.
2000 Cal is probably within 30% of what most people should have daily. But your typical American food is going to be 100-200% higher than the daily recommended amount. A Panera Bread French Onion soup in a bread bowl is literally 90% of the daily sodium, but not even half of the daily calories. Remove the bread bowl and it's still more than 1200mg of sodium for less than 400 calories.
The biggest thing I look at now when picking out meals is the sodium to calorie ratio. Anything over 1.2 is probably not good.
Yeah, came to say the same. I'm different though, I know I'm addicted to it.
I've lost over 150lbs, and can easily say sugar intake is closely tied to metabolism and brain activity. The habits formed around sugar intake are the hardest to control. It can be a major tax on mental agility and sharpness if a person is in the habit of using sugar to supplement their diet constantly. They can really struggle to find a different balance with healthy foods. There are a range of other factors that come into play that make it difficult. Chiefly, American budget food is typically very low quality, and most people have several minor food allergies. This makes people rely on junk food, likely unaware of issues like lactose intolerance that makes them unable to access healthy calories. Dairy is in EVERYTHING in American food. Like stupid stuff too. There is milk in most chips now. Like who the F puts milk in chips. It took me nearly a decade to fix how I eat, and realize we were all pretty much raised to be stupid consumers of whatever garbage is placed in front of us as Americans. Fixing the sugar addiction usually means fixing a bunch of other problems too.
Yeah, I hear you - I have an intense sugar addiction, and eat an absolutely disgusting amount of chocolate (see username). At least otherwise I eat pretty healthy.
By the way, the reason milk is in so much is because of how much cheese we eat. When they make cheese, they separate out the whey, which they used to throw away, but now they use in stuff. It has a lot of names: whey, lactose, milk solids, and others. If you're lactose intolerant, you have to watch for that for the same reason you don't have to worry much about hard cheeses: the lactose is mostly in the whey, which comes out of the cheese.
Spice
Spice can be a addiction? Keralities/indians be like💀
Let the spice flow.
The spice must flow.
Everything nice
This is why I've started limiting my sugar to once a week. It's working pretty well. The cravings dropped decently after a few days.
Oh man yeah this is true