January 6th- Andry Lupuche

After several hours of literature research, we found interesting research on sugar. According to the article “Sugar addiction: Is it real? A narrative review” from the British Journal of Sports Medicine, August 2017, sugar is equal or even more addictive than heroin and cocaine due to its white crystalline form, which behaves like a chemical or drug. Also, when the brain is low in dopamine (brain neurotransmitter and hormone), this leads to withdrawals following for a perpetual sugar intake which leads to addictive behavior. Another important point to mention is that according to applied studies in both animals and humans there are substantial parallels and overlap between drug abuse and sugar, from the standpoint of brain neurochemistry as well as behavior. Because of these findings, the team believes that a deeper knowledge of the fundamentals of addiction will allow people to make informed decisions in their own lives, to adopt healthy lifestyles to reduce the abuse of refined sugars in their diets and to support scientific research that improves the well-being of the community.

 (Visual map created by Andry Lupuche)

In addition to this, the team refined the details of the experimental procedure, which consists of the following steps: 

1. Set up the equipment on the old Stem room bench (brain master machine, syringes, special gel, donuts, and juice).

2. Have the participants close their eyes for the entire length of the experiment, to limit the artifacts collected from the device.

3. Keep a safe and pacific environment in the room.

4. Give instructions to the participants when the food was going to be administrated to them, and how to sip from the juice cup.

January 7th - Andry Lobuche

We managed to record data from three participants! However, the data recorded presented a lot of errors due to the artifacts like movements when chewing and sipping. Because of this, we decided to save the data anyways and discussed the new experimental design. It is illustrated in the following image.

(Visual map created by Andry Lupuche, Images obtained from google images)

Description of the experimental design:

• Before eating: the participant will be watching a slideshow of images of food with high content of sugar while data will be collected.
• Eating the doughnut with cookie (to exceed the content of the suggested amount per day): no data will be collected.
• After eating: the participant will watch the same slideshow of pictures while brain wave activity will be recorded.
  
  

From this well thought design, we will be able to take a video of the activity of our brain frequencies and the brain pattern before and after eating food rich in sugar. We expect to see frequencies and patterns that are like the ones for opioid addiction and alcoholics.