If you drink soda pop, especially the caffeinated kind, it could
kill you. But most especially, it can go right after your kid’s
health. Pop gives the average teenager approximately 12.5
teaspoons of refined sugar a day. It works out to that much more
than what our US government has determined people need in
unrefined sugar per day. Also, your kid and you are using soda
pop, in all probability, as a food. In 1977-78, teenagers drank
twice as much milk as soft drinks, but by 1994-96, it had turned
around; they were drinking twice as much soda as they were
drinking milk. And such consumption is linked with lower intake
of nutrients, such as vitamins, minerals and fiber.
After reading this sort of information, I drank half my
caffeinated soda and poured the other half down the drain. It
bubbled and burbled like it was cleaning my drain out. I don’t
suppose it’s doing me any good, as I’ve heard that it makes a
great toilet cleanser, too. Meanwhile, empty calories are all
those soda pops contain (aside from great drain cleaners). They
are contributing to major health problems, particularly obesity.
Such a condition has been proven to injure your health by the
USDA Economic Research Service. Several studies by them have
shown that weight gain is directly related to soft drink
consumption. Weight gain itself is the prime risk factor for
Type Two Diabetes, which can make you go blind, lose you your
job, cause lifelong paralysis and finally death. It can be
controlled only through a daily regimen of diet or medication.
Do you want that sort of thing in your life? If not, cut back on
your drinking of soda pop.
It may well be that soda pop, alcohol and other such empty
calorie consumption is a problem for teens and adults, not to
mention grade school children. That’s why they’re trying to
remove it from the schools. And as you get older, being
overweight can give you coronary disease, strokes from blood
clots building up in your arteries, and cancer. Cancer is like
being eaten away by your own body, literally a piece at a time.
Also, always downing that two-liter of soda pop increases the
risk of osteoporosis in both men and women when they drink soda
pop instead of milk, which is rich in bone-building calcium, and
dentists are especially keen on people not drinking sugar-laden,
no calcium, hopelessly empty soda pop. All it seems to do is
taste good, it would appear. Dental experts say that if you
drink it between meals to quench your thirst, you get tooth
decay and dental erosion due to the sugars and the acids in pop.
Some of your desire for pop puts you at a risk for kidney stones
and a slightly higher risk of heart disease. There needs to be
more research done in these two areas, but there has been a fair
degree of documentation done by the University of California at
Berkeley.
Caffeine, on the same hand, has been proven to be a highly
addictive drug. If you drink a cup of coffee or more per day,
day in and day out, you are technically addicted to coffee. It’s
a stimulant and has been proven to help people’s sex lives
somewhat, but it also increases the excretion of calcium. Other
ingredients in soda pop such as Yellow Number Five promote
attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in some children.
Yellow #5 also induces allergic reactions such as asthma in a
sizeable portion of individuals.
Soft drinks are one of the most heavily promoted items in all of
human history. You can find them in gas station stores, the 7-11
or the AM-PM, vending machines are everywhere, and they are
lining the school halls also. You need something wet to quench
your thirst, and that’s the secret reason people are going to
bars anyway. To get a drink. But neither the soda pop nor the
booze, as both caffeine and alcohol are addictive drugs.
US companies spend $700 million or more per year on media
advertising for soda pop per year, and hundreds of millions on
other promotional activities. They even make contracts with your
public school systems to sell soda pop in the halls. Parents and
educators have recently, however, been making a concerted
attempt to reign in that form of merchandising. Several states
have banned at least the non-diet soft drinks from some or all
schools, but that could be more of a step backward than a step
forward. It does cut the calories, and diet soda has been proven
to not quench hunger by some studies, again done at the
University of California. Your kids will not do much better on
diet soda, but at least they’ll be more prone to eating or
drinking something else…unless they don’t. Diet soda is still
full of those same acids they mentioned, and have no sugar in
them to help them along in your digestive cramp. They can cause
nausea, diarrhea and constipation, not to mention those same
allergic reactions, including asthma, as regular soda does. Diet
soda alone is not an “easy way out.”
Nonetheless, the Center for Science in the Public Interest makes
these recommendations: that governments should require chain
restaurants to declare the calorie content of soft drinks and
all other items on menus and menu boards; the Food and Drug
Administration has been told by them to require labels on
non-diet soft drinks to state that frequent consumption of
sugar-laden drinks promotes obesity, diabetes, tooth decay,
osteoporosis and other health problems; governments should
provide water fountains in schools, government buildings, parks
and other public places; school systems and other organizations,
and all those organizations which cater to children should stop
selling soft drinks, candy and junk foods in hallways, shops and
cafeterias.
Until this month of September, 2005, there was no hard and clear
evidence through science that soda itself alone can make kids
fatter. But reporting in The Lancet, a British medical journal,
a team of Harvard researchers had found the first evidence
absolutely linking soda pop drinking to childhood obesity.
Twelve year olds who drink soft drinks regularly are far more
likely to become or to be obese than those who don’t.
Obesity experts at Harvard found this to be highly important and
spent 19 months following the children rather than simply
following them around for a week or so like many studies gone
before have done. Statistically through many similar studies
it’s been found to be more important to use a lengthy study than
a sporadic or shorter study. And in this study, it was found
that schoolchildren consume who drink pop take in some 200
calories per day more than children who usually don’t. It
supports the notion that long-term obesity is an ingrained
behavior, starting in childhood, and that we don’t compensate
well for calories in liquid. In short, water or milk is simply
better.
Soda pop also has been shown to make you thirstier, and that
does lead to the further drinking of soda pop as you attempt to
quench your thirst. Something about the combination of chemicals
in many soda pops dries out people. So then they reach for
another can of soda, thus becoming committed to a vicious cycle.
And that greatly increases their calorie intake, especially
since pop today is now coming supersized as well, filling up
those larger and larger plastic single-serve looking bottles. It
might not be a bad idea to try to follow the serving suggestion,
at least, on the bottle. And it might be a better idea to drink
from a plastic bottle than an aluminum can, as the aluminum has
been shown to seep into the can. This may have something to do
with the formation of Alzheimer plaques in the human brain, as
aluminum may be a cause of Alzheimer’s disease, a dreadful
illness that causes people to forget everyone and everything
that holds any meaning whatsoever in their lives.
Is it worth it, to worship a can of a kid’s drink that was
invented as a snake oil remedy in a poor man’s fireplace by
bubbling a concoction of chemicals together that tasted good? He
only intended to sell it in small amounts to adults as a tonic,
as it did seem to settle people’s stomachs, and stimulate them.
That’s because original formula Coke’s original ingredient was
cocaine, not caffeine, but eventually cocaine became illegal.
Perhaps someday, we should follow suit on caffeine and alcohol.
But until that day ever comes, we are stuck having to police
ourselves and our children. Do it wisely.
Most of the statistics and facts in this article are from:
The Amazing Statistics and Dangers of Soda Pop
http://www.mercola.com/2001/mar/10/soda_pop_dangers.htm By Sally
Squires and Dr. Joseph Mercola
>From Liquid Candy: How Soft Drinks are Harming America’s Health
The Center for Science in the Public Interest
http://www.cspinet.org/liquidcandy/
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