For many years it was thought that marijuana led to hypoglycemia, a lowering of the blood sugar. While that sounded like a reasonable enough explanation, there was no evidence to prove it. The Boston University experiments of Weil and Zinberg laid that myth to rest, presumably to the embarrassment of the American Medical Association, which had declared it to be true only a year earlier.
Looking back on the experiments, Andrew Weil recalls his own skepticism about the alleged connection between marijuana and blood sugar levels. "If blood sugar drops seriously enough to cause a hunger for sweets," he recalls thinking, "there are probably going to be a lot of other symptoms as well. So I tried to trace back the laboratory findings supporting the link, and much to my amazement, I discovered that there weren't any. That turned out to be quite typical of those days; there were many statements in the literature, and you'd go to check them out, only to discover that nobody had done the experiments. One textbook would copy it from another textbook, entirely without evidence."
Marijuana smokers often claim they will eat anything when they are high, and there are tales of famished smokers devouring whole loaves of bread (to say nothing of cakes and pies) when nothing else is around. One woman says she sometimes eats fistfuls of brown sugar, while another tells of pouring chocolate syrup over a bowl of natural cereal, but only, she assured me, "in an emergency." People who are high on marijuana tend to show a marked preference for sweet foods and beverages, particularly such items as ice cream and candy. Indeed, many smokers who are otherwise sensitive to matters of health and nutrition will indulge in junk food after smoking marijuana. This phenomenon is commonly known as "getting the munchies." A high school girl in the Midwest writes that "at this stage a person eats everything in sight and experiences no gain in weight." The truth, alas, is less benign, and one of the most often-cited reasons for giving up marijuana is that it has led the smoker to gain too much weight. (At the same time, the fact that marijuana is in itself free of calories has been a factor in leading some relatively older users to switch to it from the more fattening drug, alcohol.)
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