Researchers: Gargling sugar water may help smokers quit (+video)

Researchers: Gargling sugar water may help smokers quitCredit: Flickr

Researchers at the University of Georgia say that sugar boosts self control.

Researchers at the University of Georgia have found that gargling sugar water can increase self-control.

Co-author Leonard Martin, a professor of psychology at the UGA, had 51 participants perform two tasks to measure self-control. The first task was the tedious crossing out of Es on a page from a statistics book. Afterwards, the participants were asked to complete the Stroop task, which is a task in which participants must correctly choose the color of various words flashed on a screen (the task is made more challenging by the fact that the words spell out the names of other colors).

According to a UGA statement, fifty percent of the students gargled lemonade sweetened with sugar while completing the Stroop test, the other half gargled Splenda-sweetened lemonade. Researchers found that participants who gargled lemonade sweetened with sugar, rather than artificially sweetened lemonade, were quicker to identify the color of various words flashed on a screen rather than the word.

“Researchers used to think you had to drink the glucose and get it into your body to give you the energy to (have) self control,” Professor Martin said in a statement. “After this trial, it seems that glucose stimulates the simple carbohydrate sensors on the tongue. This, in turn, signals the motivational centers of the brain where our self-related goals are represented. These signals tell your body to pay attention.”

While the study’s results show evidence of increased self-control after gargling sugar, Professor Marin noted that a glucose mouthwash may not be sufficient to deal with some of the most challenging self-control tasks like losing weight or smoking.

“The research is not clear yet on the effects of swishing with glucose on long-term self-control,” Professor Martin added. “So, if you are trying to quit smoking, a swish of lemonade may not be the total cure, but it certainly could help you in the short run.”

Professor Martin and co-author Matthew Sanders, a doctoral candidate also in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, argue that the motivation derives from emotive investment.

“It is the self-investment,” Professor Martin posited. “It doesn’t just crank up your energy, but it cranks up your personal investment in what you are doing. Clicking into the things that are important to you makes those self-related goals salient.”

Researchers believe that sugar leads to emotive enhancement, meaning that the individual is more invested in what he or she is doing.

“The glucose seems to be good at getting you to stop an automatic response such as reading the words in the Stroop task and to substitute the second harder one in its place such as saying the color the word is printed in,” Professor Martin said. “It can enhance emotive investment and self-relevant goals.”

Researchers point out that previous self-control studies revealed a significant decrease in performance for the second task.

“Previous studies suggest the first task requires so much energy, you just don’t have the energy left for the second task that you need,” Professor Martin said. “We are saying when people engage in self-control, they ignore important aspects of their goals and feelings. If you have to stay late at work, for example, but you really want to be going home, you have to ignore your desire to go home. Doing so will help you stay late at work, but it may also put you out of touch with what you personally want and feel on later tasks. Swishing glucose can focus you back on those goals and feelings and this, in turn, can help you perform better on the second task. In short, we believe self-control goes away because people send away, not because they don’t have energy. People turn it off on purpose.”

Professor Martin’s study looked at what the affects of gargling sugar water are psychologically rather than physiologically.

The study’s findings were recently published in the journal Psychological Science.

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