The answer is no, according to the magazine ‘El Món d’Ahir’ based on studies that relate sugar intake to addiction.
The manufacturers of Oreo are clear that they have to integrate sugar in the preparation of the cookies, because they know that then they will become addictive. Each cookie weighs 11 grams, 4 of which are sugar. Scientists who study addiction say that sugar needs six tenths of a second to stimulate the brain’s pleasure center from the time the sweetness touches the tip of the tongue until it reaches the brain. And that’s why it has such a great addictive capacity, because the time it takes to excite the brain is minimal. On the contrary, “it takes ten seconds for smoke to cross the nervous system of the throat and lungs to reach the brain”. Physicist and journalist Toni Pou explains it based, among other studies, on the book Hooked (2021), by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Moss. Pou has written about it in the current edition of the history magazine El Món d’Ahir , directed by the journalist Toni Soler, who has just published a volume dedicated entirely to sugar.
However, humans have not always eaten sugar as they do now. “Our ancestors ingested sugar in its original form, that is to say, in the form of fruit and other products of plant origin”, which did not cause any alteration in the body because, “accompanied by fiber and the rest of components, the sugar was absorbed little by little”, says Pou, who adds that in the 1st century BC sugar had already been refined and later reached Europe that way.
Beyond the nutritional and scientific story explained by the physicist, the magazine also deals with the product from different perspectives, which delve deeper into a product that has daily implications in our language (attributing the adjective sweet to people or objects always has positive connotations ) . From the point of view of literature, journalist Valèria Gaillard focuses on the French writer Marcel Proust’s cupcake, the sweet that has become a symbol of memory, with different layers of meaning. What has transpired the most is that the cupcake refers “to the tenderness of childhood”. It also “has a sensual connotation, if we look at its rounded shape, which gives a lot of play to ambiguities”. The journalist’s writing in the magazine El Món d’Ahir emphasizes that the episode of the cupcake is the best known in the history of literature, but little is known that the book in which it appears, In search of lost time , consists of seven volumes and deals with the story of a boy who wants to be a writer, but who cannot find a way to fulfill his desire to write.