Tongue Has A "sensing" Ability For Sugar

haidut

Member
Forum Supporter
Joined
Mar 18, 2013
Messages
19,798
Location
USA / Europe
This is not directly Petarian, but I have been following the news on performance enhancing effects of sugar in sports. It has been known for a long time that the performance boosting effect is present even without people ingesting the sugar but simply gargling with it and spitting it out. This study claims to have found the mechanism:

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavi ... ixth-sense

As a conclusion, this is yet another reason why diet drinks/food may be harmful - i.t. the body knows immediately we are consuming junk as soon as we put it in our mouths.
 
Joined
Mar 21, 2014
Messages
239
I think they're missing a possible confounding factor: our mouth is able to absorb sugar directly into the bloodstream, without swallowing it. I've tried this and it works, when I have low blood sugar the symptoms go away by holding sugar under my tongue without swallowing.

Sublingual sugar administration as an alternative to intravenous dextrose administration to correct hypoglycemia among children in the tropics.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16263979

Sublingual sugar for hypoglycaemia in children with severe malaria: a pilot clinical study.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19025610
 
OP
haidut

haidut

Member
Forum Supporter
Joined
Mar 18, 2013
Messages
19,798
Location
USA / Europe
CellularIconoclast said:
I think they're missing a possible confounding factor: our mouth is able to absorb sugar directly into the bloodstream, without swallowing it. I've tried this and it works, when I have low blood sugar the symptoms go away by holding sugar under my tongue without swallowing.

Sublingual sugar administration as an alternative to intravenous dextrose administration to correct hypoglycemia among children in the tropics.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16263979

Sublingual sugar for hypoglycaemia in children with severe malaria: a pilot clinical study.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19025610

I thought about that too, but the studies I saw on performance enhancement claimed that the sugar absorbed from the mouth is not enough to explain the big boost in performance especially in very exhausting situations like marathons. There seems to be a central nervous system effects that far outweighs any direct energetic benefit from sugar absorption. There is a patent claim out there for treatment of depression using sugary mouthwash. Anyways, good to know other people are experimenting on this as well.
 
OP
haidut

haidut

Member
Forum Supporter
Joined
Mar 18, 2013
Messages
19,798
Location
USA / Europe
Here is another related blog post. There are some excellent studies on the topic a the bottom of the post as well. As can be seen from the post and the studies, the sugar effect seems to be more neural than metabolic, and almost "instant", which suggests that it is not the sugar's effect on ATP that provides the boost. IMO the most likely explanation is the 40%-50% drop in serotonin, within seconds of mouth washing with sugar water. I can't find that specific study right now, but if serotonin drops by half in a manner of seconds after sugar mouth wash, then elevated dopamine can be one of the explanations for performance boost. There are quite a few studies on dopamine agonists boosting athletic performance and in fact a few of them are already banned by the International Olympic Committee (IMC) as doping agents.

http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2014/06 ... ivate.html
 

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom