The Skinny On Soda

You needn’t go further than the local grocery store to realize that an entire isle is dedicated to selling and keeping us hooked on this popular beverage we call soda or pop. Decades after its creation, soda companies continue to create new marketing campaigns to sell us more and more of it. Soda, including diet soda, is one of the major culprits contributing to obesity. This is due to the high fructose corn syrup found in soda as well as the artificial sweeteners in diet soda. The effects of high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS, are explored in further detail in another article.
Back to soda: a single 12 ounce can has as much as 13 tablespoons of sugar. Now, if you stood over a glass of carbonated water and put 13 teaspoons of sugar in it, I’d doubt you’d drink it. And yet this is what average Americans do, consuming as much as fifty-six gallons of year. Compare this to the 23 gallons the average American consumes, according to Census Bureau statistics. I can’t tell you how many people I know who say that they only drink diet soda and believe that it’s actually good for them!
Here’s a study that will surely open a few sweet-drink loving, soda consumers eyes. Researchers from Purdue University found that when rats were given sweetened and artificially sweetened beverages for a period of days, they devoured the sweet cake-like substance that was later presented to them.
Rats which drank water instead of diet soda ignored the food.
When we consume nutrient and calorie empty foods that contain sugar and that are also artificially sweetened, the body will search for more sugar and more calories.
A Texas study, resulting from 26 years of patient data, revealed that people who drink diet soft drinks tend to be more overweight. For the participants who drank diet soda, they found a correspondingly higher risk of obesity. In this study, it seemed that diet soda fared much worse than regular soda. Sweet is a taste we develop by habit. Remember, once the rats were inundated with sugar and artificially sweetened liquids, they could no longer regulate their calorie intake. It’s the same for us. The intense taste of sweet should be a signal for us to stop eating sugar, but when we overload the system with a high sugar or high carbohydrate diet, the signal doesn’t work anymore.
Why Diet Soda Can Make You Fatter
Here’s a study that parents will love. You might not be as conscious as soda’s effects on yourself as much as you probably see its effect on your kids. But consider that Aspartame, found in diet soda, is an excitotoxin that crosses the blood brain barrier. If you’re a diet soda drinker, take note.
In a nutshell, the Boston study revealed found that for those children who drank soda in schools, their teachers ranked their behavior on the days that they drank it. There was a 435 percent increase in bad behavior on soda days.
Beyond Aspartame found in soda, you will also find something called phosphoric acid in the ingredients. I challenge you to research this chemical and its effects on your body. I challenge you to do your own due diligence. Remember, you’re becoming an educated consumer, taking charge of your health and weight. This is just these consumers do.
Soda consumption is truly an addiction. We get used to the sweet taste, for its pick-me up-sugar blast (and even caffeine effect). I can’t stress how powerful soda addiction is, but if you’ve got one, you will admit it rivals the habit of drinking coffee—which is no easy task to break.
As I mentioned earlier, with diet soda, the Aspartame goes through the blood brain barrier, creating excitatory chemistry in the brain, which you can also become addicted to. Day in and day out, as you consume these excitotoxins and crash and burn, you simply keep craving another bottle of soda or more sweet food. The cycle goes on and on.
People are on the ‘diet this and diet that” rollercoaster and they can’t figure out why. They haven’t got a clue that a huge culprit for their sweet addiction as well as the excess pounds is the sweet liquid beverages they are drinking. These beverages fuel that craving cycle. The good news is that if you can break the sweet beverage habit for six weeks, you will break that vicious cycle.
Note: though I didn’t mention bottled fruit juices, they fall into the same category. These beverages also fuel that craving cycle for the sweet foods. If you must drink juice, squeeze your own and limit the amount! Here’s the good news: if you can break your sweet beverage habit for six weeks, you will break that vicious cycle.

Sugar Fermenting to Ethanol (Alcohol) Inside the Stomach!
Another study explored the tendency for some people to covert sugar into ethanol inside the body. Imagine eating cake and having it result in a DUI! In this study, after eating sugar, blood alcohol levels actually increased. Now, not everyone is going to convert sugar to alcohol inside their gut. But some doctor’s believe that the more out of whack our bodies systems become, the greater our chances for such an abnormal response. It’s clearly a signal of some kind that our body is out of balance.
Do you remember that term from science class long ago called homeostasis? It has to do with our body and its systems working in harmony together. The problem is that there are no fences inside the body. When one system fails, it impacts the other systems. Excess sugar and poor diet interrupts homeostasis, that wonderful equilibrium inside our bodies when all systems are “go.” Disease occurs when the environment inside the body is out of balance. Excessive sugar consumption is not only addicting and unnatural to the body, but it seriously interferes with the body’s natural ability to regulate one’s calorie intake.

How We Were Designed
I challenge you to start getting honest with yourself about your sugar consumption—I mean really honest. The reality is that we are not genetically programmed to be able to handle large amounts of sugar. We all know that if you give an animal in the park or in your home junk food too frequently, they’ll beg for it or even steal for it. They’ll get fat. Like animals, we were not designed to eat processed sugar. Certainly not a whopping 140 pounds of sugar a year, which remember is only the average sugar consumption for Americans. Imagine this burden on a child’s growing body and you comprehend the incidence of rising obesity and diabetes in these children as well as their parents. The problem is that much of that sugar is disguised in the misleading marketing messages on the packaged foods we eat. Have you ever noticed how a package will say “no trans fats” on the front of a box or the bag, but in the ingredients you’ll see “partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil?” In this same way, we are led to believe that certain foods that contain processed sugars are good for us. Cereal is a great example of this, and it’s a staple of the American diet.
You owe it to yourself to become an informed and dedicated consumer. It’s really worth becoming a food detective. I promise you that your body will thank you later when you’re old and free of disease.

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