Sipping Soda
Do you sit down and treat yourself to a soft drink? Maybe you choose a ‘diet soda’ and feel a little virtuous. I personally crave often for a good old coca cola, but consider this…..
A regular bottle 12 oz (about 350 mls) of sweet drink, soda, contains the equivalent of nine teaspoons of sugar, usually in the form of high fructose corn syrup.
Would you sit down and eat nine teaspoons of sugar, one after another? That’s basically what you do when you drink a sugared soda. It’s liquid lollies, drinkable candy.
Diet soda may not have the sugar or calories of regular soda, but it’s full of other health-draining chemicals, like caffeine, artificial sweeteners, sodium and phosphoric acid.
…would you eat 9 teaspoons of sugar? …
When you drink one of these diet sodas, not only do you miss out on any nutrients provided by the real sugars your body might find useful if consumed in reasonable quantities, you also get a laundry list of suspicious ingredients that work against your body’s effort to maintain healthy balance.
Foremost among these is caffeine. Many of the diet drinks are cola-based or otherwise have caffeine added. Manufacturers use cola to make soft drinks, especially diet soft drinks, seem more substantial. Yes, it gives you a sugar-like “boost,” or seems to, but that caffeine buzz really isn’t giving your body anything it needs. And the complications of caffeine consumption and addiction are well known, with fatigue, chronic anxiety, insomnia, and worsening symptoms of hormonal imbalance topping the list.
Additionally, caffeine is a diuretic, so while you may be thinking that a diet soda quenches your thirst and helps keep you hydrated, the opposite is true. Diet soda often contains sodium, which exacerbates thirst, while the caffeine causes you to lose fluid.
All carbonated sodas also contain calcium-leaching phosphoric acid.
Really, the only time you could possibly benefit from drinking these sweet drinks, diet or regular, is when you are traveling in areas where the drinking water is unsafe.
