Sugar cravings can break all of your health goals, so it is really important to keep them in check. While eating a well-balanced diet can help minimize and reduce the urge to overeat sugar, it often isn’t enough to manage the problem because of our modern lifestyles. Stress, medications, and alcohol are just a few reasons why a balanced diet isn’t enough to overcome sugar cravings. A key example of this is stress. The stress that most people have puts us all in nutritional deficits, which further amplifies sugar cravings in and of itself. The holidays are a time of particularly high levels of stress, both good and bad. Luckily for us, key dietary supplements may help reduce the desire for sugar because they make your cells more responsive to glucose and by dampening the stress response in the body. They can also offset the losses of nutrients that are involved in appetite control.
There are many research-backed nutritional supplements that can help you win the battle against sugar, including natural vitamins, herbs, and minerals. These key supplements can help reduce your sweet tooth, in other words. In this post, learn about the best supplements for sugar cravings, how they work, the reasons we crave sugar, and food strategies to keep the cravings at bay.
Table of Contents
Sugar Cravings Basics
One of the most important things you can do to reduce sugar cravings is to eat plenty of protein balanced with vegetables and healthy fats. You should also eat enough food at mealtimes so that the urge to snack on sugary treats is minimized. It is important to be gentle with yourself- a little indulgence in sugar once in a while is normal.
Besides being mindful of your diet, there are a lot of natural strategies that can help you cut back on sugar. Key herbs, nutritional compounds, vitamins, amino acids, and minerals can help reduce sugar cravings directly and indirectly. These natural supplements are meant to be a tool to help you manage your cravings.
Next I will give you an overview of why we crave sugar and supplements that reduce sugar cravings. As with anything, check with your healthcare provider before adding any supplements or changing your health routines. And make sure to eat well to help combat your sweet tooth.
What Causes Sugar Cravings?
It is normal to crave sugar. However, intense sugar cravings and frequent eating of sugary foods aren’t normal. These intense cravings are caused or created by imbalances in the body and imbalances in the diet. Often, the main cause of sugar cravings is a chronically high blood sugar level and/or frequent blood sugar spikes. This can be caused by insulin resistance, which makes the cells in your body perceive that they are starving for sugar.
In order to reduce blood glucose levels and stop sugar cravings, you need an ample supply of nutrients such as magnesium, B vitamins, healthy fats, and protein in your diet. Certain herbs like Gymnema sylvestre can help balance blood sugar too and reduce the desire for sweet food. Other causes of excess sugar consumption are stress, poor sleep, genetic tendencies to prefer sugar, and the habit of eating a lot of sugar.
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The Pitfalls of Eating Sugar
Sugar craving is like quicksand; you may not realize you have slowly increased the amount you eat until you are entrenched in it. Slowly but surely, sugar can begin to take over more and more of your diet. No one is under the illusion that sugar is somehow beneficial for us. “Hey, I should eat more sugar, it is good for me.” Those words have never been spoken and for good reason. Yet, sugar often slowly encroaches on healthy eating. For some of you, it becomes like a giant claw taking hold. It grabs you and dominates your diet. This is because we are hard-wired to eat sugar, especially if you have nutritional imbalances. In the next sections, I will discuss in detail how certain nutrients and herbal supplements can help you optimize your health so that your body no longer gets imbalanced sugar craving signals all of the time.
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Magnesium Reduces Sugar Cravings
As a clinician of over 26 years, the one nutrient that stands out the most for reducing sugar cravings is magnesium. When my clients take supplemental magnesium, they sleep better, which in turn, makes them much less susceptible to daytime sugar cravings. This is because high-quality sleep helps to manage sugar cravings. Craving sugar, specifically chocolate, is a also sign that you may be low in magnesium.
Magnesium supplements also improve cortisol response in the body which ultimately leads to less craving for sweet foods. Stress and cortisol make you pee out a lot of magnesium, so stress compounds the problem of magnesium deficiency. To complete the loop, magnesium decreases stress by enhancing the usage of relaxing neurotransmitters in the body like GABA and improve your gut probiotics. Also, by helping to improve blood sugar levels as well as glucose tolerance, magnesium is beneficial for managing sugar intake according to the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Related post: Magnesium for IBS Constipation
Protein Powder Reduces Sugar Cravings
Protein supplements and protein powders may reduce sugar cravings, especially if your diet is lacking in protein. One study found that a high-protein breakfast of 35 grams per day reduce food cravings in overweight and obese adolescent girls. This should come as no surprise because protein foods help keep you fuller longer than carbohydrates like sugar.
While you can get protein by eating eggs, chicken, fish, meats, legumes, dairy, and nuts, people generally don’t get enough protein in their diets. This is my consistent observation as a clinician. Supplemental protein often helps manage sugar cravings, especially in the evening. Just make sure to get adequate vitamin B intake; supplemental protein can increase your vitamin B6 needs.
Gymnema Sylvestre Reduces Sugar Cravings
Gymnema sylvestre is an Aruyvedic plant that has been used in India for thousands of years for its immune benefits and for managing diabetes symptoms. This herb also decreases the desire to eat sugar because it reduces the pleasing taste of sweet foods according to research. Not only that, research shows that Gymnema sylvestre helps reduce body weight and body mass index, improves insulin sensitivity, blood sugar levels, and improves glucose tolerance. Another impressive benefit of Gymnema sylvestre is that it has a lot of antioxidants that can reduce inflammation in the body. This makes Gymnema stand out as one of the best-proven supplements to reduce or stop sugar cravings.
You can make Gymnema tea, or buy it in powder or capsule forms. The most commonly used doses are 100-1000 mg 3 times daily. Check with your healthcare provider if you are taking medications that lower blood glucose, and don’t take this supplement if you are pregnant or breastfeeding.
Chromium Reduces Sugar Cravings
Chromium is an essential mineral in the body that helps metabolize sugar. Besides this benefit, research shows that chromium picolinate reduces sugar cravings in people with some kinds of depression. It also reduces food intake and reduces food cravings in overweight women.
But chromium is unlike other nutrients because it is considered a heavy metal so it can be dangerous if you get too much. Too little chromium in the body is problematic too because it causes insulin resistance which leads to food cravings. Using chromium picolinate supplements also reduce PCOS symptoms by reducing body weight indirectly by reducing food intake and improving insulin sensitivity.
Most whole foods will give you chromium, so it’s probably best in the long term to get most chromium from your diet. You can get chromium from all forms of meat, eggs, fish, oats (gluten free), fruits such as grapes, and brewer’s yeast. Still, you can take chromium supplements short-term through stressful periods of time, such as the holidays.
Resveratrol Reduces Body Weight
Resveratrol, an antioxidant present in red wine, has many health benefits. One impressive benefit is that it improves glucose control and insulin sensitivity, with an overall improvement in the ability to stabilize blood sugar. When blood sugar levels are stabilized, you are less likely to crave sugar. This healthy antioxidant supplement even helps reduce body fat, reduce body weight, and waist circumference according to research. A review study of 36 randomized clinical trials concluded that resveratrol helps reduce body weight while also increasing muscle mass and reducing body fat.
B Vitamins Reduce Sugar Cravings
Many people stress-eat and tend to eat a bunch of sugary foods when anxious. But did you know that B vitamins can help reduce stress levels? B vitamins are also responsible for helping the body make energy so that your body perceives it is getting more from food. Natural B vitamins don’t necessarily change blood glucose levels but they do help turn glucose into energy. This natural benefit of B vitamins indirectly reduces sugar cravings. A very important note: make sure to choose the natural vitamins when adding extra B vitamins. Synthetic B vitamins like folic acid can be more harmful than beneficial for many people.
Zinc Deficiency Causes Sugar Cravings
One nutrient that may not come to mind for sugar cravings is zinc, but this essential mineral is involved in metabolism of calories. Getting enough zinc in your diet is critical for overall health because it helps with immune balance and also reduces inflammation in the body. Eating sugar can cause your body to be deficient in zinc. Zinc deficiency causes cravings for sugar because it leads to impaired glucose tolerance. This is a highly under-recognized issue because over 2 billion people worldwide have a zinc deficiency and most of these people don’t know it.
Supplemental zinc helps reduce fasting glucose levels and improves glucose tolerance. As a bonus, it reduces hemoglobin A1C according to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. If you supplement zinc, make sure to take it with food to enhance absorption and reduce digestive side effects. Also, it is important that you don’t take more than 50 mg per day long term because at high doses it can block copper absorption, another essential mineral in the body. It should always be a goal to eat zinc-rich foods too, including fish, grass-fed beef, chicken, eggs, and organ meats. Plant sources of zinc, such as whole grains and legumes, are poorly absorbed unless you soak, sprout, and ferment them.
L-Glutamine May Help You Eat Less Sugar
L-glutamine is an amino acid that can help improve blood sugar control and helps stabilize blood glucose levels, but you should know that stress decreases your body’s glutamine levels. Other reasons that people don’t have enough glutamine in their bodies are infections, surgeries, injuries, high-intensity exercise, imbalanced diets, and inflammatory conditions such as leaky gut.
People who take L-glutamine supplements also may help obese people lose body weight. Glutamine increases muscle glucose use and may reduce elevated insulin levels as well. Experts are not sure whether l glutamine for sugar cravings actually works, but from a mechanistic standpoint, it should. This is because eating protein foods generally does reduce the intake of sugar and protein foods are part of how our bodies make L-glutamine. Supplemental L-glutamine may even reduce alcohol cravings and reduce alcohol intake.
Another beneficial effect that glutamine may have for you is that it can reduce muscle fatigue. By doing so, you may burn more calories. Additionally, glutamine helps to fuel your intestinal cells, allowing for more efficient nutrient absorption. Many people report that they stop craving sugar when supplementing with L-glutamine daily, although research has yet been conducted to support this.
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L-Tryptophan Reduces Sugar Cravings
L-tryptophan is an essential amino acid that is responsible for making serotonin. Mostly sold in the supplement form called 5 HTP, tryptophan reduces cravings for sugar and increases preference for protein over carbohydrate intake according to multiple clinical studies [R, R]. As a bonus, 5 HTP helps many people have a happier mood. It often works best when combined with the amino acid L-tyrosine.
L-Tyrosine Reduces Sugar Cravings
By boosting the happy brain chemical called dopamine, L-tyrosine may reduce the desire for mood-induced sugar cravings. Additionally, tyrosine may give your mood a more happy and focused feeling. Related post: L-Tyrosine Changed My Life and it May Change Yours Too
Iron Helps Glucose Metabolism
If you are low in just about any nutrient, the body can be low in energy and will seek out sugar to compensate. Iron is no exception. Additionally, iron deficiency anemia may impair glucose metabolism in the body, ultimately leading people to want to eat more sugar. Iron deficiency is very common in women of childbearing age.
Fiber Promotes Fullness
Fiber supplements may help curb sugar cravings because they make you feel full longer and also promote the growth of healthy bacteria in the gut. A healthy gut means fewer cravings for junk foods, including sweets, according to Psychology Today. Related post: Best Fiber Supplement for IBS-Diarrhea
Probiotics Reduce Sugar Intake and Body Weight
Probiotic foods and fermented foods undoubtedly help you crave less sugar. This is because the healthy bacteria in your gut can dictate a lot about the foods you crave. Research shows that a healthy microbiome plays a key role in keeping you from eating unhealthy foods like sugar. If that wasn’t enough, probiotic supplements are helpful for mood too. This, in turn, may help reduce your food cravings. Last but not least, probiotics supplements help aid weight loss.
Sugar itself causes harmful bacteria to thrive regardless of your own gut ecology, making sugar cravings even worse. By balancing out these harmful bacteria with healthy bacteria like probiotics, you can help reduce your sugar intake. Probiotic bacteria send powerful signals and transmit messages to our brains about what we should and shouldn’t eat. Who is in charge of whom one might wonder? Some unlucky folks have high amounts of bacteria that tell them to crave and eat a lot of sugar. Luckily, many fermented foods and probiotic strains seem to help people lose weight, including Lactobacillus gasseri and Akkermansia muciniphila which is considered a GLP1 probiotic.
It is possible that if you are able to give up sugar (and processed foods) for at least 3 weeks, these bacteria start to get outnumbered by the more beneficial types that keep you lean. Why 3 weeks? It often takes 3 weeks to develop new diet habits. Try the no-sugar challenge for 3 weeks; don’t crash diet, just eat whole foods, and in moments of sweet cravings, choose fruit or even honey to break the habit. Honey won’t overtake your diet as it is so much less convenient than added sugars. It also has its own health rewards for the gut.
GABA May Stop The Snacking
GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) may not be on your radar, but it is a natural compound found in a variety of fermented foods like sauerkraut, yogurt, tempeh, fermented fish, and natto. It is also found in grains like rice and in vegetables. This natural, relaxing compound helps improve muscle mass in the body. Its ability to improve sleep quality is part of why some people experience a reduction in sugar cravings with its use. Supplemental GABA may also help curb sugar cravings because it reduces inflammation and protects the cells that produce insulin in the body known as beta-cells. GABA supplements help increase lean muscle when combined with whey protein better than whey protein alone according to a small randomized clinical trial.
Fish Oil Enhances Insulin Sensitivity
Fish oil may help improve insulin sensitivity and cut the risk of diabetes. It also indirectly boosts metabolism by reducing the amount of white fat and increasing brown fat, which burns more calories than white fat. Taking fish oil supplements is a good long-term strategy for health and glucose management, but isn’t a quick fix for sugar cravings.
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Seasonal Sugar Cravings
Summer can be the worst for sugar cravings, where cold treats and refreshing beverages with sweet iciness are practically everywhere, promising our bodies energy and relief from the heat. Then shortly after that, Halloween candy saturates your cells. Before you know it, the holidays are upon you, and half of your year is resigned to battling your willpower. Spring is spent fighting the cravings, only to be plunged back into the heat of summer again. Even if sugar isn’t an overly sweet treat at hand, it is added to just about every food item in the store from cereals to bread and snacks.
All Humans LOVE Sugar
It tastes great, it instantly gratifies, and we are hard-wired to want sugar. Yet sugary food has its grip on so many people and it really isn’t doing much for us besides instant gratification. Research has barely touched the surface of the intricate dance of food cravings, appetite control, food-pleasure response, mood, and environment interactions with our genes. What is clear is that sugar is extremely difficult to avoid in modern culture. But learning to understand your own internal driving forces may be the key to keeping sugar at bay in your life.
We also eat sugar because our brains still think famine is around the corner. People were most definitely not designed to have energy drinks, soda, cookies, candies, and sugar-infused packaged foods at every turn. We crave sugar because, from an evolutionary standpoint, it helped prevent starvation in times of food scarcity.
Humans gladly eat up every last morsel of sweet food to get through droughts, winters, and shortages. In one human’s lifespan, there would be many of these hardships in the past. In the past, people mostly ate honey, as cane sugar was rare. Honey, by the way, is a much better option than sugar. Additionally, it’s better to reach for some fresh fruit or dried fruit instead of sweetened beverages or foods. This will help balance your microbiome to result in fewer cravings in the long run.
The Problems Of Excess Sugar
Since the early 1900s, people have almost tripled their sugar consumption, and the levels of intake go unabated today. The average intake of sugar calories per day is 300 calories. That is the equivalent of almost 1/3 cup of sugar per day. Evolution tells us to eat up.
Even so-called health foods sneak in a lot of added sugars. And yet here we are, faced with fighting our hard-wired desire to survive when it doesn’t really apply in a world of plenty. Some experts argue sugar is the biggest driving force of obesity, chronic diseases, and healthcare dollars. During the 1980s high-fructose corn syrup hit the scene and sugar became even more saturated in our foods than ever. Knowing that our evolutionary wiring is designed to make us want sugar may not change the action, but education is half of the behavior change.
Packaged, Processed Foods are Sabotaging our Diets
Evolution forces us to use sheer willpower when faced with sugar everywhere, and a “just say no” mentality at most turns. We really aren’t meant to be faced with excess sugar at every turn. Sure, we can occasionally indulge in small amounts of sugar when it really counts, but external forces of packaged foods everywhere are a problem. That’s why supplements can be a helpful tool.
Reduce Sugar Cravings by Fixing Your Diet
Sometimes sugar begets more sugar. This is because sugar depletes key nutrients that drive energy. You run low on energy and then crave more sugar to compensate for the lack of energy that sugar initially caused by making you deficient. Think of it like alcohol; it robs the body of nutrients like some of the B vitamins, and certain minerals as well. Sugar causes disruption of the gut by increasing inflammation, making more insulin that causes further fatigue ultimately. Because of this, you will need to heal yourself by switching out sugary foods for whole foods that are rich in protein, healthy fats, vitamins, and minerals to stop the cycle.
Why You Need Supplements for Sugar Cravings
The sequence of nutritional depletion due to eating sugar is staggering. Here are the key points of how sugar robs your body of nutrients:
- Displaces nutritionally superior foods
- Decreases appetite for more nutritious food
- Depletes nutrients within the body
- Provides zero nutrition
- Causes insulin resistance
- Insulin resistance decreases the use of glucose for energy so you crave more sugar due to a lack of energy
- Impairs the ability to burn fat
- Energy requirements are also increased due to elevated insulin levels
- Sugar induces a state of ‘internal starvation’
- Decreases nutrient absorption due to intestinal irritation/damage
- Increases nutrient losses caused by reduced absorption, leading to diarrhea
- Damages the cellular components that help burn calories
- Produces unnatural drug-like cravings leading to a vicious cycle of continued consumption and further nutrient depletion
High-quality supplementation of vitamins, minerals, and botanicals may help offset some of the issues listed above caused by long-term sugar consumption. This can include natural B vitamins, and minerals like chromium, magnesium, zinc, and others.
Try Eliminating Sugar for 3 Weeks
To change the damaging patterns that sugar causes, a diet that is committed to eliminating or drastically reducing simple sugars and processed carbohydrates is needed to change the trajectory of poor health. Give this a try: eliminate all added sugars for 3 weeks. Commit to this time period, and you may be surprised how little you miss sugar after that.
Reduce Stress to Reduce Sugar Craving
Stress is driven by too much sugar, and stress itself amplifies sugar-eating. The stress hormone cortisol in turn causes blood glucose to rise. This rise in cortisol causes an increase in insulin, and drops testosterone, both of which can result in weight gain and fatigue, which circles back to craving more sugar. Total sugar intake is related to cortisol and the amount of visceral fat, the most dangerous kind of fat in the body. It is best to help beat stress by going against the craving and eating healthy fats, proteins, and nutrient-rich foods like greens and whole foods. None of these foods come in a pre-made package.
Reset the stress; look at what you will and won’t tolerate as daily problems because stress doesn’t necessarily go away. It might help to remember that another word for stress is fear. It is not healthy to constantly feel fear. Balance circadian rhythms, chat with good friends, think positive thoughts, and visualize happy images to get through the worst of it.
Sugar is an Addictive Substance
You probably heard of sugar being described as a drug. By driving up dopamine levels, sugar has similar, but more mild effects on the brain than both legal and illegal drugs. Dopamine is very rewarding because it makes us feel good, and gives us a feeling of pleasure, so we turn to sugar again and again for the same effects. The brain chemical dopamine also is known as the motivation neurotransmitter as it makes us feel focused and alert. Sugar also appears to affect opioid receptor binding. As with any drug-like effect, however, dopamine has diminishing returns with sugar; it stops working, just as in drug addiction. Poor diet, certain medications, and thyroid disorders contribute to plummeting dopamine levels and thereby make us want more sugar.
How to Naturally Increase Dopamine Without Sugar
The building blocks of dopamine and serotonin are amino acids, called L-tyrosine and L-tryptophan, which might help curb sugar cravings. L-tyrosine, the dopamine-building block from your diet, does seem to help mitigate stressful responses. You should provide the body with tyrosine-rich foods and tryptophan-rich foods. These happen to be protein-rich foods like cheese, chicken, fish, eggs, meats, nuts, legumes, and some grains. You can supplement these amino acids as well, which is helpful in reducing cravings. Artificial sweeteners like aspartame or NutraSweet should be avoided as well because they seem to disrupt the ability of the brain to make dopamine and possibly other neurotransmitters. Probiotics may also increase brain dopamine. Oh, the complex web our gut bacteria weaves.
Supplements for Sugar Cravings Summary
Awareness of our internal driving forces to eat sugar serves to empower change. Sometimes one step at a time may help slowly gain back a balance in the diet and allow for managing cravings. Supplements, whole foods, fermented vegetables, and probiotics may be the building blocks to achieving this balance.
Disclaimer: The information on this website has not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration or any other medical body and is shared for educational purposes only. While The Healthy RD’s posts are backed by research, you are unique. So you must seek care from your own dietitian or healthcare provider. This post is not meant to diagnose or treat any conditions. Consult your doctor or healthcare provider before making changes to your supplement regimen or lifestyle.
