Sugar Headaches

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 6, 1908

T. M. ALLISON believes that many of the so-called “bilious” attacks are due to an excessive intake of sugar. The sugar standard of nature is the quantity found in milk. The excess taken in food (not alone as sugar, but also as starch, which in body metabolism becomes sugar) is converted into lactic acid, which irritates the terminations of the gastric vagus, and sets up the well-known but badly named “bilious attack,” with its distressing symptoms of “megrim,” of which the commonest is hemi-headache (generally referred to the left eye-ball, and relieved by pressure), together with vomiting, giddiness, and depression. The author says that if sugar were expensive instead of being cheap, there would be many less puzzling cases of headache for which eye-strain, heredity, and various other factors are assigned.