The sugar habit

Finally, three years ago, the Culver City woman acknowledged that she was hooked on sugar.

"It's like being an alcoholic," says the 37-year-old entertainment executive, who was extremely overweight when she joined a 12-step treatment program. "There is always the danger I'll go back to it if I don't have some sort of support program. I still struggle with wanting to use sugar as a drug."

The concept of sugar addiction has been popularized in books -- and joked about -- for decades. But most health experts have long maintained that overuse of sugar doesn't meet the criteria of addiction, typically described as an intense desire for a substance (so that it disrupts normal life), great difficulty stopping use of the substance and a severe physiological response upon withdrawal. People who are addicted, they add, lose control over their behavior and use a substance compulsively and repetitively in spite of adverse consequences related to their actions.

Now researchers are finding what many sufferers have long suspected -- the compulsive overeating of sugar does at least share some of the characteristics of more destructive addictions. Their work is shedding light on the neurological response of those who abuse sugar.

In a widely discussed study presented earlier this month, for example, Princeton University psychologist Bartley Hoebel showed that rats will not only eat sugar excessively, they suffer from withdrawal when denied sugar and continue to crave it weeks later.

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Addiction 'plausible'

Most of the studies so far have been in animals. But researchers at Columbia University will soon launch a study focusing on sugar dependency in bulimics -- people who binge (usually on rich, sweet food) and then purge.

"There are people who have pathological, clinical eating disorders who say they are addicted to chocolate and other sweets. And you know what? They may be," says research nutritionist Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington. "I think it's plausible."