As Americans we love our soft drinks. We feel like we would really lose out if we couldn’t experience ‘the real thing’ or ‘the choice of a new generation’. And with all that promotion of a life of enjoyment when sipping on your favorite soda, how can we believe otherwise? And they are so tasty.
If we sat back and really applied common sense, we would quickly conclude that drinking liquid sugar is just not going to be good for us. A typical can of cola contains 10 teaspoonfuls of sugar after all. In fact, it is often worse than that, since we are often drinking high fructose corn syrup – something even worse than ‘real’ sugar.
What do the studies show about soft drinks? One of the clearest links is to obesity. Beyond obesity there are studies linking high levels of soft drink consumption to diabetes, heart disease, tooth decay and according to a recent study, even to osteoarthritis in the knees.
Sugary soft drinks are reported to be the single largest source of empty calories in the American diet. (Empty calories are calories a person consumes that do not reduce the person’s appetite, in other words, you still eat the same amount of food while consuming all those calories in soft drinks.) It is quite common to have some children consuming 1,000 and even 2,000 calories a day from soft drinks – effectively almost doubling their daily caloric intake. And then we wonder why we have a huge problem with obesity in children (not to mention the rest of our population).
Are we picking on soft drinks? According to the USDA, 16% of calories in the typical American’s diet come from refined sugar and half of those calories come from beverages with added sugar. Imagine that – almost 10% of our caloric intake consists of something that is definitely very unhealthy for us.
And what about those diet drinks? Surely they are better? In a study of 2,564 participants in a Northern Manhattan Study over a 10 year period, comparisons were made between those drinking regular and those drinking diet soft drinks and those who regularly consumed diet drinks saw a 43% increase in their risk of a vascular (heart-related) incidents. Some may say the jury is still out on diet drinks, but the amount of genetically modified corn-based products in diet drinks (the major source for artificial sweeteners is GM corn) certainly shouldn’t leave us feeling very good about them. Now, if you are a diabetic and you have to choose, sure, diet is ‘better’. But better here does not mean ‘good’.
So what do we conclude? Simple. Stop drinking soft drinks – the sugar kind and the diet kind. Or at the very least, drastically curtail your consumption – say, to less than 2 or 3 servings per week. And one of the best ways to drop something is to replace it with something that is healthier. So in that spirit, why not try drinking water, green tea, coconut water or water with organic lemons squeezed into it. The latter is a very health alternative since it provides us the hydration our body requires while reducing our body’s acidity (yes, the ‘acid’ of a lemon actually has the opposite effect on our body) – and more acidic bodies are heavily linked to increased risk of cancer.
Take the dare and switch. Your body will thank you – maybe not this week, but in the coming months and certainly in the coming years!
– The Alternative Daily