Potatoes Not Prozac Simple Solutions for Sugar Sensitivity

Introduction to the New Edition Before you delve into this second edition of Potatoes Not Prozac, I want to give you some background on our program for healing sugar sensitivity. It helps to have context when making a decision to trust a healing program. How can you know whether this program works? Is this just one more promise that will turn to dust over time or is there really something to it? To answer those questions, let's connect with the power of both the science behind the methods and the lived experience of those who are doing the Potatoes Not Prozac program. The Science Science is an exciting tool in helping you understand how your body works. Countless men and women working in academia around the world are asking questions and seeking new answers: They develop careful experiments to test a hypothesis. Then they publish their experimental results in peer-reviewed journals to invite critique and confirmation by their peers. The process is rigorous and demands careful scrutiny on one question at a time. The strength of this process comes with the scientific dialogue over years of validation. A major constraint of this process is that it takes years to evolve and also depends upon funding that may be affected by a changing political climate. Even more problematic is that science books are about data rather than real people who are living complex, messy lives. Scientists work to exclude the complexity and contradiction of messiness by focusing on one variable at a time, attempting to exclude what are called "confounding variables." Field clinicians work directly with people rather than simply manipulate numbers. Clinicians are in the trenches of every-day life. When I started the process of looking at the science, I was a clinician in the field of addiction. I brought years of experience to the table. I had worked in mental health, nutrition, and public policy. I had started and run an addiction treatment center and had listened to thousands and thousands of clients. This professional experience, added to the personal background I will tell you about in chapter 1, motivated me to find more answers in science. My educational training was nontraditional and interdisciplinary. Rather than enter a field, I wanted to create one. Rather than narrow my scholarly work to one question, I wanted to find answers to the questions that arose in my work with people. So I came to the scientific literature from an outside-the-box perspective and started reading in many fields. I read the literature for addiction, psychology, nutrition, and neuroscience. Here are the facts I gathered and began writing about in the first edition of this book. The brains of alcoholics are different from other brains. This special configuration is inherited. There are people who are sensitive to carbohydrates and have a more powerful blood sugar response to eating them. When needed, the brain releases opioids (natural painkilling chemicals), and these can affect your choices of what you eat. Sugar acts like an opioid drug, such as morphine and heroin, in the brain. The kind of foods you eat and the timing of your eating can affect your mood. All these facts had been established in the scientific literature by 1996, but the very nature of scientific research (which looks at one thing at a time) meant that the people doing the alcohol studies were not looking at the nutrition findings, and the nutrition folks were not thinking about the connection to genetics. For example, the questions being explored about sugar as a drug were along the lines of "Can we use sugar as a painkiller in infant circumcision?" Because my clinical experience was based on listening to people's experiences -- which did not divide themselves neatly into discrete scientific categories -- I was able to conceptualize a theory that crossed all the relevant disciplines. My working hypothesis waDesMaisons, Kathleen is the author of 'Potatoes Not Prozac Simple Solutions for Sugar Sensitivity', published 2008 under ISBN 9781416556152 and ISBN 141655615X.