Some thoughts on addiction.

Addiction is a strange thing. According to Maureen Boyle, from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, "Addiction is a biopsychosocial disorder. It's a combination of your genetics, your neurobiology and how that interacts with psychological and social factors". 

There you go! 

And it’s all to do with dopamine,  “a molecule that ferries messages across the brain's reward center. It's what gives people the feeling of pleasure and reinforces behaviors critical for survival, such as eating food and having sex”, so the definition goes. 

It works with beer too as Phil will testify; he always declares that the first mouthful of a glass of Boddington’s bitter is the best mouthful of the whole glass. Of course, this might be because we tend to drink beer only a Thursday evening when he returns from chess club. 

I got onto this topic after reading an article about someone “quitting” diet Coke, and going through headaches, sweating, shaking, all the sort of stuff you hear about when someone goes cold turkey from drugs.  And this is a soft drink she was weaning herself off. Mind you, she was drinking rather a lot of it, probably drinking more diet coke than she was water. 

Personally, on the rare occasions I drink Coke I prefer it “full fat” as I don’t like the taste of artificial sweeteners. Indeed it’s not just Coca Cola but any kind of artificially sweetened soft drink or squash; the aftertaste of the artificial sweetener takes away the enjoyment of the flavour of the drink. This applies to fruit juices too, the ones described as such-and-such a fruit ‘drink’. Fruits like cranberry and pomegranate are amongst the worst. In both cases manufacturers seem to feel that consumers want the drink sweetened but, of course, sugar won’t do and so they add aspartame or something similar. And yet, I have drunk freshly squeezed pomegranate juice in Sicily -produced by one of those machines that almost every southern European cafe bar has for squeezing oranges - and it was perfectly fine without sweetener.

Mind you, I think back to my childhood when it was considered perfectly normal to sprinkle strawberries with sugar - to enhance the flavour, naturally! Come to that, my mother would let us have sticks of rhubarb and a eggcup containing sugar to dip the sour fruit into. Okay, rhubarb is a lot more tart than strawberries, but it says something about a dangerously relaxed attitude to sugar back in the day. 

Many years ago, more than I care to remember, when those of us who drank “proper coffee” thought we were oh so sophisticated, far superior to instant coffee drinkers, but before the advent of all the odd-flavoured coffees available nowadays, a friend of mine had a coffee-addiction experience. She had taken to brewing a large pot of coffee in the morning and consuming it gradually over the day. As time went on she found herself brewing a second pot and consuming that as well. One day she ran out of coffee and thought nothing of it until at some point in the morning she began to feel rather shaky. As the day went on she developed a nasty, nagging headache and found it hard to concentrate on things. She only felt better when her husband returned home with supplies of coffee and she brewed a pot, feeling better almost at once. She gradually weaned herself off it, not entirely but reducing her intake to reasonable proportions.

Human beings are strange and interesting animals. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!