Andrew Huberman· PhD
You crave sugar because of the sweet taste & because of subconscious sugar sensing neural circuits in your gut.
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The headline is broadly defensible, but the qualifications matter. Effect sizes vary by population, the strongest claims rest on shorter trials, and credible voices push back on how it's typically framed.
You crave sugar because of the sweet taste & because of subconscious sugar sensing neural circuits in your gut.
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So to put this differently, you actually have sensors within your body that make you crave sugar independent of the sweet taste of those things. Now that's incredible. And what it does, and what it tells us is that we have circuits in our body that are driving us towards certain behaviors and making us feel good even though we can't perceive them.
In order to illustrate the immense power of these subconscious circuits for sugar seeking, I'd like to describe an experiment. And this is just one experiment of many, of dozens or more experiments done in animal models and humans, which essentially illustrate the same thing.