Rehab plan focuses on diet

By DAN RICE, Staff Writer

Audrey Sunnyboy noticed a troubling trend when she entered the drug and alcohol treatment field in 1990.

"I was watching people and was realizing that most of the Alaska Native people did not recover from alcoholism," she said. "And as I was going along, I would ask, 'Did you ever go to AA?' Then they would say, 'No, because I didn't want to talk.'"

Sunnyboy said the realization that AA's 12-step program does not work for everyone, especially people who are reluctant to talk about themselves, is what led to her interest in providing an alternative form of treatment.

Last month, Sunnyboy, a 57-year-old certified traditional counselor originally from Nenana, opened the Sunny Denyaave Center, an office where she hopes to help alcoholics and drug users quit their habits by repairing their bodies through nutrient replacement and proper diet.

Her strategy is based on the work of Joan Matthews Larson, a Minnesota doctor who operates nutrition-based recovery centers and has authored books about her technique.

Sunnyboy spent a year working at Larson's Health Recovery Center in Minnesota in 1999 and has been trying to start her own center in Alaska ever since. The technique is based on the theory that drugs and alcoholism are treatable physical diseases, not moral flaws.

"The way AA looks at it and the way most people look at it is as weak-willed, psychological behavior," Sunnyboy said. "What (Larson) and the other doctors say is that that is not so. An alcoholic or person who is addicted to drugs is not nutritionally sound."

With her rented office in Regency Court Mall, Sunnyboy said she plans to coach clients through a six-week program aimed at repairing the body through introducing a host of vitamins and nutrients and improving the diet.

Curbing drug and alcohol cravings can be as simple as changing what people eat, she said.

"Sugar and alcohol cause the same reaction in the body," said Sunnyboy, whose computer desk is stacked with books including a sugar-free cookbook and William Duffy's "Sugar Blues."

Sunnyboy explained that sugar and alcohol consumption both result in the pancreas increasing blood sugar and releasing insulin. Continued sugar consumption, she said, causes the pancreas to become "trigger happy," producing an imbalance that leads to feelings of irritability and cravings for alcohol and drugs.

She said that reducing a person's carbohydrate intake and adding high-protein foods to their diet will stabilize the body. Combined with the introduction of vitamins, everything from magnesium to vitamin B, the goal of the improved diet is to replenish nutrients needed to restore balance in the body and brain.

"That's what this treatment program does is to explain why the body does this," Sunnyboy said. "You control the cravings with nutrition, you learn to eat smaller, protein-packed meals, you learn how to maintain your body."

Sunnyboy, who quit drinking and doing drugs at age 40, said she first became interested in nutrition-based recovery after reading Larson's "Seven Weeks to Sobriety." In the book, Larson wrote that her son committed suicide after a short bout of alcoholism, leading to her search for a better treatment method. She hypothesized that every alcoholic fits into one of four categories based largely on their body's composition--most are hypoglecimic--and that dietary changes can improve someone's condition in almost every case.

"Alcoholism is not a character defect. It is not the sign of a weak will. It is not a bad habit that needs to be broken. It is a devastating physical disease that damages both mind and body," Larson wrote.

Larson's book and other nutrition-based recovery methods are gaining popularity throughout the drug and alcohol treatment field, said Ann Dapice, vice-president of T.K. Wolf, Inc., a Tulsa, Okla.-based recovery and research center that formed as an alternative to traditional methods.

Dapice said the main factor preventing nutrition-based recovery and other programs that treat alcoholism as a physical defect from gaining widespread acceptance is that AA is still considered to be the only treatment option.

"You've got a very old guard of alcoholism and drug treatment people," she said. "They say it's a disease, but they treat it like it's a moral issue. It's very hard to convince old 12-step people to change."

Dapice has a personal reason to be frustrated by what she said is a lack of progressiveness in the alcoholism-treatment field. She said her son survived cancer with treatment only to later die due to symptoms of alcoholism.

A disabled Vietnam veteran, Littlefield said he started drinking and doing light drugs almost every day during the 1990s after his deteriorating physical condition ended his ability to work as an electrician.

Littlefield said he gradually built up his body through taking nutrients such as cod liver oil and calcium. Once he added an improved diet, Littlefield said he started feeling better, first physically then mentally.

"After she built me back me up from all the vitamins and everything, I could think a lot better," he said, adding that he quit drinking and drugs about two weeks after starting the program.

Sunnboy said that she put up her own money to rent her new office. She said that after spending a year working with Larson, she made it her personal goal to bring the program north. Sunnyboy acknowledged that she faces plenty of challenges in trying to operate a center based on a technique that is not widely accepted. However, she said many effective practices, such as Dr. Robert Atkins' low-carbohydrate diet, were not popular at first.

The author of Potatoes Not Prozac, Kathleen DesMaisons, PhD makes this point in her book. She started out as an addictions counselor. From the website Radiant Recovery

Brain Chemistry 101
Our sugar sensitivity story includes some crucial data that has not been available to the general public before.
This information is about the vital role played by the brain chemical beta-endorphin. Beta-endorphin and its better-known partner, serotonin, can have dramatically positive -- or negative! -- effects on your moods, your behavior, and your energy level.
Your brain is designed to communicate information.
Billions of brain cells talk to each other moment by moment via a network of interconnecting cells. However, these cells do not actually touch one another; there is a tiny space between them. Information is passed across this space by way of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. The mood-elevating brain chemicals serotonin and beta-endorphin are both neurotransmitters.
Each neurotransmitter has a unique molecular shape and carries a unique message.
The message of serotonin, for example, is "calm down". When one brain cell wants to send a message to another, it releases the relevant neurotransmitter, which floats across the tiny space between cells and looks for the receptors in the target cell that match its molecular shape.
A serotonin, for example, can only pass its message to a serotonin receptor. The same is true with beta-endorphin. If any other kind of neurotransmitter hits the receptors, nothing happens; the message does not get delivered.

Serotonin
When your serotonin is at an ideal level, you feel mellow and relaxed, hopeful and optimistic.
You have a sense of being at peace with life. You are creative, thoughtful, and focused. You also have a lot of impulse control, which enables you to "just say no" more easily.
People who are sugar-sensitive have naturally low levels of serotonin. As a result, they do not have good impulse control. It is almost impossible for them to "just say no" because there is such a short time between their getting the urge to do something and their doing it. This is why no matter how many times you vow to stick with a diet, you are not able to. The insufficient serotonin level in your brain isn't giving you the time you need to make good decisions.
Besides being impulsive, people with low levels of serotonin may feel depressed and find themselves craving foods such as bread, pasta or candy. This craving is the work of your brain, not your ego, because your brain knows that getting you to eat such foods -- which are all simple carbohydrates -- will temporarily raise your serotonin level. Unfortunately, it will also have a devastating boomerang effect and cause all sorts of negative feelings. Having low serotonin can cause these feelings:
Feeling depressed Acting impulsively Feeling blocked and scattered Having a short attention span Feeling suicidal Craving sweets and simple carbohydrates

Beta-Endorphin
The brain chemical beta-endorphin acts likes a powerful natural painkiller.
You may have heard of the "runner's high" (also called an "endorphin rush"), when the body responds to the pain of long-distance running by flooding the brain with beta-endorphin. Beta-endorphin produces a sense of well-being, reduces pain, eases emotional distress, increases self-esteem, and even creates a sense of euphoria.
Sugar-sensitive people have a naturally low level of beta-endorphin.
Their biochemical response to foods (like alcohol) that cause the release of beta-endorphin can be significantly greater than that of people with ordinary body chemistry.
Whether you are sugar-sensitive or not, sugar, like alcohol, causes a release of beta-endorphin. It can make you feel high and can reduce both physical and emotional pain. People with normal body chemistry can enjoy this without ill effects. But sugar-sensitive people respond to the beta-endorphin effect of sugar in a bigger way because their brain cells have far more beta-endorphin receptors than ordinary people.
For us sugar-sensitive people, eating sugar can make us feel and act as if we've been drinking wine!
Sugar can make us funny, relaxed, silly, inappropriate, talkative, and temporarily self-confident. You feel great -- and you long to feel this way again and again.
You have probably noticed this drug-like effect after eating sugar. Unfortunately, people don't take this response seriously. They make jokes about being a "chocoholic", but rarely speak of the real pain caused by the continuing and compulsive use of sweets, the end result of which is a drop in beta-endorphin. Having low beta-endorphin means:
Feeling tearful, isolated, depressed, and hopeless Having low self-esteem Feeling "done to" by others Having a low tolerance for pain (emotional and physical) Feeling emotionally overwhelmed Craving sweets So how does raising our beta-endorphin level with sugar result in low beta-endorphin?
The same way raising our blood sugar level or serotonin level ends up having just the opposite effect. First of all, due to a mechanism in the beta-endorphin system called "priming", ingesting a small amount of a drug (like sugar) can make a person want more. Priming is the reason it is so hard for a sugar-sensitive person to "just say no" after having a taste of something sweet. Second, the more sugar we eat, the more beta-endorphin is released, causing the brain to compensate for this "excess" by shutting down some of its beta-endorphin receptors. The result? Low beta-endorphin -- and all the pain that goes with it.

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