Feel free to be loose with your definitions. “Not usually considered a drug” is fine to qualify as “non-drug”, for instance. I’m not really thinking so much of “foods”, though, but maybe “food ingredients” and substances found in food ingredients are fine, especially if they’re quasi-drug-like or if you’d get a lot of the same benefits/enjoyment from it consuming it straight rather than in food.
Also ITT, tell other users why their substances actually are drugs actually.
Mine:
- Chamomile - good for my mood and gives me vivid dreams.
- Capsaicin - I and Wilbur Scoville are well acquainted.
- Cacao - I don’t really do cacao any more because I’ve quit caffeine, but I include it here because I still miss sucking on unsweetend baker’s chocolate daily.
Oh my gosh. I get violently ill and can’t stay out of the bathroom when I eat sugar. (I’ve told people, “yeah, sugar makes me sick so I don’t eat it”. And they’re like “oh yeah, me too, the sugar crash in the afternoon always makes me feel so blah.” And I’m like “listen…”.) I basically haven’t eaten anything sweeter than a tomato in 20 years because it’s super not worth it. I’d never heard of SIBO, and I don’t have any letters after my name, but this SIBO thing sounds very much like my experience.
Not that having a name for my symptoms would really change much to speak of. It doesn’t seem like there’s much of a treatment for SIBO aside from eating in ways that don’t trigger it. But hell. At this point, if there was a cure, I don’t think I’d take it. I’ve only had one cavity in the last 20 years (and I suspect that actually wasn’t a cavity but rather a resorption). Keeping my weight in a healthy range is way easier without sugar in my diet. My taste buds have adapted a lot and things that wouldn’t taste remotely sweet to anyone else taste super sweet to me, so I don’t feel deprived in that way. I have a lot more appreciation for more complex and stronger flavors like bitter, sour, spicy, etc. And I appreciate having that “biofeedback mechanism” that tells me (and not subtly) “hey, that’s bad for you; cut it out”.
(I cut gluten out of my diet the same time I cut sugar out of my diet and my symptoms abated. I’ve had a couple of times when I’ve had sources of sugar – granny smith apples and bing cherries specifically – and my symptoms came back. But I haven’t had occasion to experiment with gluten to see if having gluten would give me symptoms again. I just haven’t tried it, so I don’t know if I’m sensitive to gluten or not. I don’t make restaurants break out the gluten-free deep fryer or anything. I just ask them to leave the bun off my hamburger or whatever. But gluten is another thing that I just don’t feel deprived for lack of and don’t see how my life would improve any by putting gluten back in my diet. Maybe some day I’ll have enough bread to figure out whether it affects me the same way, but I don’t have any plan to do such an experiment any time soon.)
And, yeah. I can attest to your point that cutting sugar out of your diet is entirely doable. I virtually never miss it, and in the very rare cases when I do, it’s more of a mild nostalgia than anything you might call a “craving”.