Dopamine, it's all in your head.

The pleasure of a friends company, a good joke, book, beauty, sensual art or encounters, good food, all these cause a chemical release in the brain that intensifies the pleasure, in fact is most of the pleasure, that's dopamine we make it and we consume it in our head.  Street drugs are the most severe dopamine enablers.  Brain scans record this, and demonstrate that in between use of these drugs, dopamine background levels fall.  In other words, the normal hum-drum level of happy is reduced, to feel good the drugs need to be applied more often and in greater doses.  Addiction!

Accidentally it was discovered in a brain scan, then studied and confirmed, obese people have the identical dopamine reaction with sugar.  Addiction.  Dopamine levels can only be elevated to "happy" with sugar.  Of course they don't go to the same level of high, and sugar doesn't push them to carjack or turn tricks for sugar money.  But, I can now understand a little better the glutton's dilemma.  Got a monkey on your back cold turkey man, and seriously, there is no reason to give babies or children sugar, my son didn't taste a soft drink until he was almost 4, and then by a god damn fat ass brother in law who bought him a 24 ounce coke in a bakery and an 8inch chocolate cookie (the house speciality).  Asshole.  Biblethumping asshole.  Well the kid is 30 now, and does not have a sugar habit.   

In the movie "Heaven Can Wait" Warren Beatty, in his new life found out that among his vast wealth was a sugar business, he tells his advisors to sell it because, "sugar, it's bad for the body".