Can too much sugar make you feel sick

If you’ve ever woken up in a pile of junk food wrappers—or just, you know, overdone it on Halloween candy in a less dramatic fashion—you may be familiar with the feeling of a sugar hangover. The unpleasantness you’re left with several hours after going all in on sweets (headache, fatigue, shakiness, general crappiness) can feel eerily like a booze-induced hangover. But what causes this cascade of awful symptoms? We spoke with a few experts to find out.

Table of Contents Show

Your Joints
Your Pancreas
Your Kidneys
Your Body Weight
Your Sexual Health
What are the symptoms of too much sugar?
What to do when you eat too much sugar and feel sick?

When you eat food, especially carbohydrates like sugar, your body acts quickly to keep your blood sugar at a normal level.

Unless you have a health condition like type 1 or type 2 diabetes, your body typically does a pretty great job of regulating your blood sugar, which is the concentration of glucose in your blood. Glucose serves as your body’s main source of energy, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) explains, so keeping it in the right balance is important.

So, let’s say you eat some carbohydrates. In response, your pancreas secretes a hormone called insulin into your bloodstream to break down those carbs for energy, endocrinologist Clare Jung Eun Lee, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, tells SELF. This keeps the level of sugar in your blood within a normal range. (We’ll dive into how diabetes can influence this process in a bit.)

When the opposite problem occurs—your blood sugar drops due to too much energy expenditure (exercise) and/or not enough fuel (food)—your liver releases glucose it has stored for this very purpose, the Mayo Clinic explains. This helps maintain your blood sugar even when you’re running on fumes.

Consuming a high concentration of simple carbohydrates (like candy) can cause a more rapid and dramatic uptick in blood sugar than complex carbs (like brown rice).

“The extent to which your blood sugar is [changing] is different than if you were to have a well-balanced meal,” Dr. Lee explains. A well-balanced meal contains complex carbohydrates like whole-wheat products, which your body breaks down more gradually, as well as protein and fat to further slow that carbohydrate absorption.

Even if you devour a ton of simple sugars, your blood sugar should stay in a technically normal range because your pancreas will produce insulin to help convert it into energy. But, Dr. Lee explains, “You will still have a relatively large flux in your glucose.” Soon after eating a lot of sugar, you may feel an initial jolt of energy, especially if your blood sugar was on the low side before eating. After that, though, you may feel the start of that “sugar hangover” thanks to modest symptoms of high blood sugar, or hyperglycemia, such as fatigue, headache, and increased thirst, according to the Mayo Clinic. If you don’t have a condition like diabetes, the symptoms shouldn’t be severe and won’t be dangerous to your health. They just won’t feel great.

The “hangover” sensation really comes into play a few hours after you eat all that sugar, when the insulin your pancreas secreted after you ate causes a blood sugar dip.

While your pancreas usually gets it right, it can overcompensate. “Sometimes after a very high-sugar meal or beverage, an exaggerated amount of insulin is released to accommodate this sugar load,” Mary Vouyiouklis Kellis, M.D., an endocrinologist at Cleveland Clinic, tells SELF. Several hours later, as this insulin peaks, your blood glucose will start falling quickly. “You can get a ‘crash and burn’ effect,” Dr. Kellis says. “This phenomenon is known as reactive hypoglycemia.”

Chances are you already know that eating too much sugar isn’t good for you. Yet you’re probably still overdoing it. Americans average about 270 calories of sugar each day, that’s about 17 teaspoons a day, compared to the recommended limits of about 12 teaspoon per day or 200 calories.

Sugary drinks, candy, baked goods, and sweetened dairy are the main sources of added sugar. But even savory foods, like breads, tomato sauce, and protein bars, can have sugar, making it all too easy to end up with a surplus of the sweet stuff. To complicate it further, added sugars can be hard to spot on nutrition labels since they can be listed under a number of names, such as corn syrup, agave nectar, palm sugar, cane juice, or sucrose. (See more names for sugar on the graphic below.)

No matter what it’s called, sugar is sugar, and in excess, it can negatively affect your body in many ways. Here’s a closer look at how sugar can mess with your health, from head to toe.

Your Brain

Eating sugar gives your brain a huge surge of a feel-good chemical called dopamine. That explains why you’re more likely to crave a candy bar at 3 p.m. than an apple or a carrot.

Because whole foods like fruits and veggies don’t cause the brain to release as much dopamine, your brain starts to need more and more sugar to get that same feeling of pleasure. This causes those “gotta-have-it” feelings for your after-dinner ice cream that are so hard to tame.

Your Mood

The occasional candy or cookie can give you a quick burst of energy (or “sugar high”) by raising your blood sugar levels fast. When your levels drop as your cells absorb the sugar, you may feel jittery and anxious (a.k.a. the dreaded “sugar crash”).

But if you’re reaching into the candy jar too often, sugar starts to have an effect on your mood beyond that 3 p.m. slump: Studies have linked a high sugar intake to a greater risk of depression in adults.

Your Teeth

You probably rolled your eyes at age 12, but your parents were right: candy can rot your teeth. Bacteria that cause cavities love to eat sugar lingering in your mouth after you eat something sweet.

Your Joints

If you have joint pain, here’s more reason to lay off the candy: Eating lots of sweets has been shown to worsen joint pain because of the inflammation they cause in the body. Plus, studies show that eating or drinking sugar can raise your risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.

Your Skin

Another side effect of inflammation is that it may make your skin age faster.

Excess sugar attaches to proteins in your bloodstream and creates harmful molecules called “AGEs,” or advanced glycation end products. These molecules do exactly what they sound like they do: age your skin. They have been shown to damage collagen and elastin in your skin -- protein fibers that keep your skin firm and youthful. The result? Wrinkles and saggy skin.

Your Liver

An abundance of added sugar likely contains fructose or high fructose corn syrup. Fructose is process in the liver and in large amounts can damage the liver. When fructose is broken down in the liver it is transformed into fat. In turn this causes:

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD): This is seen as excess fat build-up in the liver.
Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH): is a fatty liver, inflammation and "steatosis," which is scarring of the liver. Scarring eventually cuts off blood supply to the liver. Many of these develop into cirrhosis and will need a liver transplant.

Your Heart

When you eat or drink too much sugar, the extra insulin in your bloodstream can affect your arteries all over your body. It causes their walls to get inflamed, grow thicker than normal and more stiff, this stresses your heart and damages it over time. This can lead to heart disease, like heart failure, heart attacks, and strokes.

Research also suggests that eating less sugar can help lower blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease. Plus, people who eat a lot of added sugar (where at least 25% of their calories comes from added sugar) are twice as likely to die of heart disease as those whose diets include less than 10% of total calories from added sugar.

Your Pancreas

When you eat, your pancreas pumps out insulin. But if you’re eating way too much sugar and your body stops responding properly to insulin, your pancreas starts pumping out even more insulin. Eventually, your overworked pancreas will break down and your blood sugar levels will rise, setting you up for type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Your Kidneys

If you have diabetes, too much sugar can lead to kidney damage. The kidneys play an important role in filtering your blood. Once blood sugar levels reach a certain amount, the kidneys start to release excess sugar into your urine. If left uncontrolled, diabetes can damage the kidneys, which prevents them from doing their job in filtering out waste in your blood. This can lead to kidney failure.

Your Body Weight

This probably isn’t news to you, but the more sugar you eat, the more you’ll weigh. Research shows that people who drink sugar-sweetened beverages tend to weigh more -- and be at higher risk for type 2 diabetes -- than those who don’t. One study even found that people who added more sugar to their diet gained about 1.7 pounds in less than 2 months. Excess amounts of sugar can inflame fat cells causing them to release chemicals that increase weight.

Your Sexual Health

If you're a man, you may want to skip the dessert on date night. Sugar may impact the chain of events needed for an erection.

It affects your circulatory system, which controls the blood flow throughout your body and needs to be working properly to get and keep an erection.

What are the symptoms of too much sugar?

What are the symptoms of sugar overload?.

Headaches..

Irritability..

Fatigue and difficulty concentrating..

Feeling jittery or anxious..

Feeling shaky or dizzy..

Hunger..

Bloating..

What to do when you eat too much sugar and feel sick?

Eat some protein and fiber Stabilize your blood sugar by eating some slow-digesting protein and fiber. If you don't, your blood sugar will crash and you'll potentially feel hungry and want to eat again. Great snack options are an apple and nut butter, a hard boiled egg and pistachios, or hummus and veggies.