“Respect your body, honor your hunger, feel your fullness.”

These are three of the 10 principles in Intuitive Eating (St. Martin’s, 2020), a book Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch penned to help you — surprise, surprise — eat intuitively. But I believe you don’t need to read the book or know anything at all about the other seven principles to understand first and foremost why a book like this is necessary. Why so many people need instruction to do three things you’d assume would be instinctual.

It’s because of what we’re now learning through food research. That instinct goes out the window when sweet stuff, particularly in the form of added sugars, goes down the throat.

Now you know me as a sugar-basher for sure, but I’m not the only one. In “Why Sugary Drinks May Be the Unhealthiest Food Out There,” for instance, Lorena Pacheco, PhD, a registered dietitian and nutrition research scientist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, does her own bashing of SSBs, sugar-sweetened beverages.

She refers to them as nothing more than “liquid candy” and being “noxious” to your health. Worse, she tells WebMD, is that the typical — and usually sound — all-things-are-good-in-moderation advice doesn’t work here.

That you must avoid SSBs, not moderate your consumption of them.

But this isn’t just Pacheco’s opinion. It’s also a rundown of the study she headed that was published in the March 2024 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

It found that a “higher SSB intake was associated with CVD [cardiovascular disease] risk” — and that this is true — “regardless of physical activity levels.” That regular exercisers who consumed just two sugary beverages a week had a 15 percent higher risk of CVD when compared to regular exercisers who never drank SSBs.

Furthermore, the participants in the study who did no exercise and drank two sugary beverages a week increased their risk of CVD by 50 percent.

These results lead to the paper wholeheartedly “support[ing] the current recommendations to limit the intake of SSBs even for physically active individuals.”

Yet these results did not factor into why Nathaniel Johnson, Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics, University of North Dakota sugar bashed, too. In “Worried about the health effects of the sugar in your breakfast cereal?”, an article he wrote for The Conversation published in July, he first establishes breakfast cereal’s financial might — its projected revenue for 2024 in the U.S. alone is $22.5 billion — and that, though not as bad as it had been in the 1980s, breakfast cereals still contain too much added sugar.

He then echoes Pacheco’s anti-moderation stance toward added sugar, by saying the fewer of these “empty” calories one eats the “better” but eating zero “is best.”

While he acknowledges sugar’s sweetness is not “technically” addictive in the eyes of science, he cites a well-known study published by PLOS One in August 2007 that opens your eyes to its addictive-like power. In it, rats learned to press levers that led to either saccharin-sweetened water or cocaine being dispensed.

In time, 94 percent of the rats came to prefer the saccharin-sweetened water over the “highly addictive and harmful substance.” (FYI: The PLOS One paper also notes “the same preference was also observed with sucrose, a natural sugar.”)

And their preference for saccharin didn’t change even by increasing the dose of cocaine discharged. Additionally, the “preference for saccharin was maintained in the face of increasing reward price or cost, suggesting that rats did not only prefer saccharin over cocaine (‘liking’) but they were also more willing to work for it than for cocaine (‘wanting’).”

The paper concludes with the speculation that in most mammals, the “addictive potential” results from an “inborn hypersensitivity” to sweet tastes.

Which leads us back to Tribole and Resch and one of the 10 principles found in Eating Intuitively that hasn’t yet been considered in this article but is explained in detail in one found on their website.

Principle 3, “Make Peace with Food,” advises you to “call a truce,” to “stop the food fight” and give yourself “unconditional permission to eat.” For if you don’t, it can create “intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing.”

The problem is, according to Pacheco, her study, and Johnson, too, is that giving yourself permission to eat added sugar is the opposite of a ceasefire. It’s an escalation of the war.

Moreover, it seems to me that it’s virtually impossible to “respect your body, honor your hunger, feel your fullness” — all health-engendering steps, for sure — if you do indeed call a food truce and eat moderate amounts of added sugars.

Because, even if it falls a bit short of being considered addicting in scientific circles, it’s plain and simple: consuming added sugars is no good for you.