How harmful is soda? Why should you give up soft drinks?
During yesterday's broadcast of Superbowl on American TV, expensive soft drink (soda) ads from Pepsi and Coke, as usual, attracted a lot of attention. An average American guzzles 44.7 gallons of soft drinks every year, about the size of a small kiddie pool, accodring to an article in Yahoo Health. There are many compelling reasons to give up soda, for example:
1- A recent Danish study revealed that drinking non-diet soda leads to dramatic increases in dangerous hard-to-detect fats, including liver fat and skeletal fat. The regular-soda group also experienced an 11 percent increase in cholesterol.
2- Some popular soda brands, including Mountain Dew, use brominated vegetable oil—a toxic flame retardant—to keep the artificial flavoring from separating from the rest of the liquid. This hazardous ingredient—sometimes listed as BVO on soda and sports drinks—can cause bromide poisoning symptoms like skin lesions and memory loss, as well as nerve disorders.
3- Many American soda brands are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, a heart-harming man-made compound derived mainly from genetically engineered corn. The problem? Genetically engineered ingredients have only been in our food chain since the 1990s, and we don't know their long-term health impacts because the corporations that developed the crops never had to test them for long-term safety. Case in point: Some recent findings suggest that genetically engineered crops are linked to digestive tract damage, accelerated aging, and even infertility!
Related:
Lose Your Weight But Not Your Health
