One of my readers sent me an interesting article about the sugar high and “boosting” awareness. Now the researchers claim that gargling sugar water raises awareness and improves performance. Now how did they conduct a study to measure this? Lets take a brief look.
Sugar High Study
The study was conducted using two tasks of self control and 51 students. Half of the students rinsed their mouth out with splenda sweetened lemonade while the other half used lemonade sweetened with sugar. They had to gargle it for a good 3-5 min. I bet their teeth weren’t too happy with all that sugar splashing around in their mouth! Both groups were asked to cross out the letter E on a page from a statistics book. The other test was to identify the color of different words that flashed on a screen, with the words spelling out the names of other colors.
The students who gargled sugar lemonade were the ones who performed better versus the ones who gargled the splenda laced lemonade. The problem here lies in the research. Now I don’t know how much of an insulin spike gargling sugar will cause, but this study is obviously flawed. The first and most obvious question to ask is who are these students? Were they selected at random or were they selected based on grades? How do we know the splenda lemonade doesn’t impair brain function? The sugar is improving it? Maybe it’s the lemon in the lemonade. This is an observational study that means nothing more than a guess.
Now as for the negative side effects of gargling sugar, I don’t really know. What I do know is sugar is bad for you and sugar is bad for your teeth. Sugar does stimulate the nervous system telling your body it needs to use energy and maybe give you a sugar high. What happens to someone who is insulin/leptin resistant? Will gargling sugar water just put them to sleep? I’m going to go ahead and do my own observational study. Since I’m in ketosis, let me go gargle heavy cream or beef tallow and see if I get the same response. I’ll probably have less confounding variables in my personal study than this lousy sugar high study.
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