How many people drank iced coffee, soda, Gatorade, fruit juice, or another sugary beverage today? If you did, you’re not alone. Given the large number of sugary beverage options and the marketing behind them, most of us turn to sugary beverages when we are thirsty, which is creating multiple health problems.
Sugary beverages may look pretty and taste good, but they are full of empty calories, preservatives, chemicals, and artificial colors and flavors that are terrible for our health. They can make us overweight, dependent on drugs like caffeine, weaken our immune systems, and expose our bodies to chemicals that attack our vital organs and even create an environment for cancer to grow!
Yes, cancer! For example, there is a highly consistent link between sugary drink intake and cancers of the digestive tract, particularly colorectal cancer. Sugary drinks have also been linked to liver, kidney, breast, and uterine cancers, which means Americans are literally dying from what they choose to drink.
What’s more, sugary beverages don’t hydrate our bodies effectively because their high sugar content can pull water from our cells, diluting it. This dilution process also disrupts our body’s fluid and electrolyte balance. The result is that, despite drinking sugary beverages regularly, many Americans are dehydrated, and we experience dehydration symptoms such as low energy, moodiness, reduced athletic performance, constipation, and poor sleep.
But wait, that’s not all! Sugary beverages are also acidic, meaning they steal the properties of whatever they come into contact with. Drinking sugary, acidic beverages weakens our bones and even steals nutrients from our bodies, setting us up for osteoporosis later in life.
Of all the sugary beverages, soda is the worst offender. Whether it’s Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Mountain Dew or any knock-off brand, they all have one thing in common: they are terrible for our health!
Americans purchase approximately 140 BILLION cans of soda every year. If you started counting right now at one number a second, it would take you 4,436 years to count that high! There are only 330 million Americans, so that’s 424 cans PER PERSON!
The biggest problem with soda is that it is roughly 100,000 times more acidic than your own blood and that acid takes its toll on every part of your body. Here are the top five ways soda fizzles your health:
* Weight gain: High in sugar and empty calories, which can lead to obesity.
* Type 2 diabetes: Causes insulin resistance and spikes blood sugar levels.
* Tooth decay: Acids and sugars erode enamel and cause cavities.
* Heart disease: Correlated with high blood pressure, inflammation, and elevated cholesterol.
* Bone weakening: Phosphoric acid can interfere with calcium absorption, reducing bone density.
If you paint a picture of someone who drinks soda regularly, that person is more likely to be overweight, have acne and other skin problems, have yellowed teeth, poor heart health, and weak bones. Plus, they are setting themselves up for osteoporosis and all the cancers we mentioned above.
What’s particularly sinister about soda is the caffeine. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) states that caffeine causes physical dependence and clear withdrawal symptoms, such as a throbbing headache, low energy, achy muscles, brain fog, irritability, and even tremors. This means that if you stop drinking soda or other caffeinated beverages like coffee and tea, you WILL suffer.
These withdrawal symptoms give us a strong motivation to keep reaching for another can. When we do drink a can or bottle of Coca-Cola or Mountain Dew and stave off these symptoms, we feel good, feel rewarded, and it tastes great, cools us down on a hot day, and the caffeine makes us feel energized. All of these rewards create a vicious cycle with the negative health impacts, and the more you drink, the worse it gets!
We have to stop thinking about soda as safe or fun. Regular soda consumption is a serious health crisis. Soda is a highly addictive, damaging, and potentially lethal sugary beverage that we should avoid at all costs.
The bottom line is soda, and other sugary beverages, are simply not worth the physical and mental toll. Isn’t life hard enough already? We have got to start making life easier on ourselves and one way to do that is to replace sugary beverages with water.
