What would actually happen is that every drop of sugar would start tasting much sweeter, you’d begin to find the flavour even in bland food, and all the sugary stuff you used to eat would become too sweet to stomach (at least for the first few bites, after which your old “sugar addiction” would relapse).
Lately I’ve been alternately on-sugar/off-sugar. A couple of months ago I accidentally into a low-carb diet (I never really planned to avoid carbs specifically, it just turned out that a healthy diet doesn’t have many carbs in it), and the sweetest thing I used to eat was (very) dark chocolate, with 11% saccharides. I was eating about 20g/day of it, and every crumb tasted like sugary heaven. Then some well-meaning relatives came by with some homemade cookies that I just didn’t feel like resisting anymore (my appetite started leaning away from meat & veggies and towards carbs). A few days into that habit, I turn to the dark chocolate I had left. I was surprised to see how bitter it began tasting, and stopped eating carbs again just so that I could feel the sweetness in it.
Remember adaptation. (This actually draws a nice parallel to the topic of happiness even though the specific mechanisms here are of blood sugar and insulin.)
Everything you say is true, but doesn’t seem to contradict my point (if that’s what you intended).
What I meant was that while I would likely experience qualitatively similar patterns of happiness to someone who never ate much sugar, I wouldn’t know how my experience compared quantitatively, and that’s important when measuring ‘greatest sum of pleasure’.
What would actually happen is that every drop of sugar would start tasting much sweeter, you’d begin to find the flavour even in bland food, and all the sugary stuff you used to eat would become too sweet to stomach (at least for the first few bites, after which your old “sugar addiction” would relapse).
Lately I’ve been alternately on-sugar/off-sugar. A couple of months ago I accidentally into a low-carb diet (I never really planned to avoid carbs specifically, it just turned out that a healthy diet doesn’t have many carbs in it), and the sweetest thing I used to eat was (very) dark chocolate, with 11% saccharides. I was eating about 20g/day of it, and every crumb tasted like sugary heaven. Then some well-meaning relatives came by with some homemade cookies that I just didn’t feel like resisting anymore (my appetite started leaning away from meat & veggies and towards carbs). A few days into that habit, I turn to the dark chocolate I had left. I was surprised to see how bitter it began tasting, and stopped eating carbs again just so that I could feel the sweetness in it.
Remember adaptation. (This actually draws a nice parallel to the topic of happiness even though the specific mechanisms here are of blood sugar and insulin.)
Everything you say is true, but doesn’t seem to contradict my point (if that’s what you intended).
What I meant was that while I would likely experience qualitatively similar patterns of happiness to someone who never ate much sugar, I wouldn’t know how my experience compared quantitatively, and that’s important when measuring ‘greatest sum of pleasure’.