Could sugar enhance self-control?

In a piece of unusual good news about the sweet stuff, an Australian scientist has proposed a new understanding of the established link between sugar and improved self-control.

As Neil Levy, from Macquarie University, explains in the journal Philosophical Psychology, the current ‘ego depletion’ model of the link between glucose and self-control holds that self-control is a depletable resource. Or, put another way, glucose is the fuel for the engine of self-control.

But Dr Levy isn’t convinced, and he proposes a rival ‘opportunity costs’ model. Glucose isn’t a ‘fuel’ to support self-control, he suggests, but a signal of environmental quality.

“[Glucose] is a signal that the environment is such that there is relatively less urgency to pursue [smaller, sooner] rewards, and that strategies aimed at securing [larger, later] rewards are likely to be relatively more successful,” Levy said, explaining that when people in a resource-rich environment are less sensitive to ‘competing rewards’, they tend to work longer at tasks for which the payoff or reward is delayed: the very definition of self-control.

“The subject persists longer because the subject continues to deploy resources without shifting them; the subject performs better because the subject allocates proportionally more resources to the task, as a consequence of not needing to devote resources to scouring for competing opportunities.”

Levy acknowledged that glucose might only be one signal of environmental richness. “Any cue that signals a lack of urgency to pursue immediate reward should be expected to have the same effect,” he observed.

It’s also unlikely that sensing glucose alone would be enough for the body to change its strategy; it may be the case that the body picks up on glucose only when other signals of poverty, conflict or instability are absent. “It is not glucose per se that constitutes the signal: it is glucose correlated with the absence of cues indicating the need to pursue it immediately,” he concluded, acknowledging that his theory needs further exploration.

Read the full article online: http://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2016.1173202.