Why Drinking Soda Can Destroy Your Health

Mmmmmn soda. It's bubbly, crisp, cold, refreshing and sweet, and really does the job of washing down a big, greasy cheeseburger. If you opt for caffeinated pop, it really does the job of picking you up out of a midday slump. Despite soda having a sweet side, the reality of the uplifting fizz is that it can trash your chompers, contribute to obesity and diabetes, and there is even emerging evidence that the carbonation in soda may be responsible for the rise in oesophageal cancer in countries where citizens are regular soda consumers. Really, it's a shame, since I enjoy soda myself, but the best thing you can do is to drastically reduce your intake or eliminate it altogether, if you dare. Oh, and I don't recommend regular consumption of big, greasy cheeseburgers, either.

Reason #1: Sugar Content

Obviously, soda has loads of sugar, which makes it deliciously (and addictively) sweet, but do you know that some sodas have up to eleven teaspoons of sugar per 12 ounces!? Can you imagine manually spooning eleven teaspoons of sugar into something you were about to drink? Yuck. You can practically make a batch of cookies with that amount. Sugar, like the soda it sweetens, has been the subject of much controversy over the years, and there is confusion even among health professionals about what health conditions and ailments it has the ability to cause. The first proven way sugar adversely affects your health is through temporarily impairing your immune system by lowering white blood cell activity by 50%--all within 10 minutes of swallowing. What does this mean? This means that your body, after drinking soda loaded with sugar, has a reduced ability to fight off infection and sickness, and this affect lasts up to 5 hours.

Secondly, sugar upsets the body's delicate blood sugar balance, and all of the hormones that go along with it. Being a high glycemic index product, it rapidly raises blood sugar levels all at once. Eating sugar causes the body to release insulin from the pancreas as its attempt to clear the sugar from the body and maintain healthy blood sugar levels. If one constantly eats sugar, eventually, the pancreas weakens from continuously producing excess insulin, and stops working properly, with diabetes being the end result. In addition to being responsible for regulating blood sugar, insulin is tied to fat storage, and excess amounts of insulin circulating from over-consumption of sugar means that more fat will be stored, and you will gain weight. As bad as the sugar in soda sounds already, it gets much worse.

Did you know that sugar could indirectly lead to heart problems? Sugar cannot be processed by the body without nutrients, which soda surely does not contain. Due to this, the body uses its micronutrient stores to process simple sugars. "When these storehouses are depleted, metabolization of cholesterol and fatty acid is impeded, contributing to higher blood serum triglycerides, cholesterol, promoting obesity due to higher fatty acid storage around organs and in sub-cutaneous tissue folds." (LeDuc, 2002). High cholesterol can clog arteries, which can lead to many health conditions, including a heart attack.

Reason #2: Acidity

Seeing that cola can remove rust spots from chrome bumpers, grease from clothes, dissolve a t-bone steak in two days and a nail in about four days, you would have to agree that soda is certainly quite acidic. Those facts alone make me never want to take even a sip ever again. The lower the pH level of a certain type of soda, the worse it is for you, your precious teeth, and your entire body. While battery acid has a pH of about 1.00, cola is around 2.8-way too close for comfort. Did you know that the enamel on your teeth starts dissolving when it comes into contact with a substance that has a pH level of 5.5 or below? If you are still determined to drink soda despite it being possibly one of the worst things you can ingest, make sure to at least rinse with water afterward. Brushing is actually not recommended directly after drinking soda since the mouth becomes an acidic environment, and tooth enamel will further be eroded.

Reason #3: Artificial Sweeteners

I know what you're thinking. Since sugar is so bad for you, you can probably still get away with having a little acid on your teeth once in a while, as long as it's sugar-free diet soda, right? Wrong. I don't care that diet soda is sold in every grocery store and convenience store across the United States, and I don't care that aspartame and sucralose (fake sugars in soda) are approved by the FDA. What I do know is that, "85 percent of all complaints registered with the FDA are for adverse reactions to aspartame, including five reported deaths." (Mercola, 2005). Aspartame, which is the main ingredient in most diet sodas, is associated with birth defects, brain cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, emotional disorders, and neurological conditions. "In a two-year study conducted by the manufacturer of aspartame, twelve of 320 rats fed a normal diet and aspartame developed brain tumors while none of the control rats developed tumors, and five of the twelve tumors were in rats given a low dose of aspartame." (Mercola, 2005). How does your body metabolize aspartame? Once it enters your body, it turns into methanol (wood alcohol) and then into formaldehyde and formic acid. Wood alcohol is a deadly poison, and can cause a myriad of frightening symptoms from nausea to vision problems. Other toxins that make up aspartame like aspartate and glutamate are excitotoxins that kill neural cells.

Sucralose (brand name Splenda) is also a very questionable product due to the fact that it has only been approved for use in food products since 1998, and there has been no long-term human research on the product. It is basically chlorinated sugar, and research on lab animals has shown aborted pregnancies, reduced growth rate, and enlarged kidneys and liver, just to name a few. While in America we are free to hold our own opinions, for me, it is just way too soon to be consuming sucralose without long-term studies--I prefer not to be a lab rat for the manufacturers.

To summarize ladies and gentlemen, high sugar content, high acidity, and artificial sweeteners that make up soda will, indisputably, completely destroy your health if consumed on a regular basis. If you must sneak in a sip once in a while, I highly recommend:

1. Rinsing with water immediately afterward
2. Avoiding artificial sweeteners at all costs as it is comparable to mixing sweet poison with flavoring and carbonation.

Avoiding soda can be the best thing you can do for your teeth, your waistline, and your overall health.