Warning: Soft Drinks May Seriously Harm You….
Welcome to our health & self help blog.
Focus on Your Health:
In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective. We do posts on staying healthy; preventing disease; aging more slowly; weight loss; exercise; nutrition; & news in medicine.
Today's post: Monday, 6-4-2007
Warning: Soft Drinks May Seriously Harm You….
(This headline was in a recent NewsMax.com email from their Health Alerts email newsletter. See below for more info on them & how to subscribe if you like.)
And, this is in addition to the fact that drinking either regular or diet soft drinks will make you fat if you do it more than a few months & drink them more than a handful of times a month. (Most people who drink soft drinks at all drink more than that each week. And, many drink that many each day.)
Here is their article:
“Warning: Soft Drinks May Seriously Harm You
You may want to think twice before you sip another soft drink: research reported in the UK's Independent newspaper says a common preservative used in fizzy drinks can switch off essential parts of DNA. The preservative may bring on premature aging and trigger diseases associated with old age.
The problem preservative is sodium benzoate, commonly used for many years by the $160 billion worldwide soft drink industry. Sodium benzoate, derived from benzoic acid, prevents mold in drinks like Coca-Cola, Oasis, Dr. Pepper, etc., and is also used in pickles and sauces.
Alarm bells have already been ringing about it, because it's been discovered that when it's mixed with vitamin C in soft drinks, it creates the carcinogenic substance benzene. Now UK Professor Peter Piper of Sheffield University has sounded an even louder alarm — his experiments show that benzoate damages DNA in the energy-producing mitochondria of cells.
"These chemicals have the ability to cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria to the point that they totally inactivate it: they knock it out altogether," Piper said. "The mitochondria consumes the oxygen to give you energy and if you damage it — as happens in a number of diseased states — then the cell starts to malfunction very seriously. And there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA—Parkinson's and quite a lot of neuro-degenerative diseases, but above all the whole process of ageing."
The World Health Organization, the Food Standards Agency in the UK, and the US Food and Drug Administration all say that sodium benzoate is safe. Professor Piper, however, says that FDA tests are out of date.
"The food industry will say these compounds have been tested and they are completely safe," Piper said. "By the criteria of modern safety testing, the safety tests were inadequate. Like all things, safety testing moves forward and you can conduct a much more rigorous safety test than you could 50 years ago."
Here are my comments:
This effect is many times worse than this article suggests if this information is correct.
Mitochondrial damage can make you too tired to have a decent life. It can directly cause heart failure. And, a recent discovery suggests that mitochondrial damage is one of the more significant causes of all cancers.
This means that if drinking soft drinks has this effect over time in most people, drinking soft drinks may be more dangerous than smoking if you live long enough or overdo soft drinks that much.
And, if this effect is small in most people, or doesn’t affect some people, there is no guarantee you or any particular person will be in the lucky category.
So, if you haven’t already given up soft drinks completely or cut them back to about once a month or less to save your waistline from adding fat, our suggestion is to do it to protect your health for this new reason.
It literally may save your life or make your last years healthy ones when they otherwise would have been lived in dreadful & worsening health.
***********
About the NewsMax.com Health Alerts:
They do a nice job of emailing out some health news that may be important to you.
I don’t think they are perfect. But they mostly seem to be pretty good. And, they are quite current on their health news coverage.
I’ve not bought any of the advertised health products or information in the emails. So I cannot give you any feedback on those.
However, unless you are a right-wing, conservative Republican, I do not recommend their other non-health news coverage.
If you are though, you will probably like it.
To sign up for their NewsMax.com Health Alerts (or their non-health coverage if you like), go to:
http://www.newsmax.com/emailsub.cfm
Focus on Your Health:
In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective. We do posts on staying healthy; preventing disease; aging more slowly; weight loss; exercise; nutrition; & news in medicine.
Today's post: Monday, 6-4-2007
Warning: Soft Drinks May Seriously Harm You….
(This headline was in a recent NewsMax.com email from their Health Alerts email newsletter. See below for more info on them & how to subscribe if you like.)
And, this is in addition to the fact that drinking either regular or diet soft drinks will make you fat if you do it more than a few months & drink them more than a handful of times a month. (Most people who drink soft drinks at all drink more than that each week. And, many drink that many each day.)
Here is their article:
“Warning: Soft Drinks May Seriously Harm You
You may want to think twice before you sip another soft drink: research reported in the UK's Independent newspaper says a common preservative used in fizzy drinks can switch off essential parts of DNA. The preservative may bring on premature aging and trigger diseases associated with old age.
The problem preservative is sodium benzoate, commonly used for many years by the $160 billion worldwide soft drink industry. Sodium benzoate, derived from benzoic acid, prevents mold in drinks like Coca-Cola, Oasis, Dr. Pepper, etc., and is also used in pickles and sauces.
Alarm bells have already been ringing about it, because it's been discovered that when it's mixed with vitamin C in soft drinks, it creates the carcinogenic substance benzene. Now UK Professor Peter Piper of Sheffield University has sounded an even louder alarm — his experiments show that benzoate damages DNA in the energy-producing mitochondria of cells.
"These chemicals have the ability to cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria to the point that they totally inactivate it: they knock it out altogether," Piper said. "The mitochondria consumes the oxygen to give you energy and if you damage it — as happens in a number of diseased states — then the cell starts to malfunction very seriously. And there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA—Parkinson's and quite a lot of neuro-degenerative diseases, but above all the whole process of ageing."
The World Health Organization, the Food Standards Agency in the UK, and the US Food and Drug Administration all say that sodium benzoate is safe. Professor Piper, however, says that FDA tests are out of date.
"The food industry will say these compounds have been tested and they are completely safe," Piper said. "By the criteria of modern safety testing, the safety tests were inadequate. Like all things, safety testing moves forward and you can conduct a much more rigorous safety test than you could 50 years ago."
Here are my comments:
This effect is many times worse than this article suggests if this information is correct.
Mitochondrial damage can make you too tired to have a decent life. It can directly cause heart failure. And, a recent discovery suggests that mitochondrial damage is one of the more significant causes of all cancers.
This means that if drinking soft drinks has this effect over time in most people, drinking soft drinks may be more dangerous than smoking if you live long enough or overdo soft drinks that much.
And, if this effect is small in most people, or doesn’t affect some people, there is no guarantee you or any particular person will be in the lucky category.
So, if you haven’t already given up soft drinks completely or cut them back to about once a month or less to save your waistline from adding fat, our suggestion is to do it to protect your health for this new reason.
It literally may save your life or make your last years healthy ones when they otherwise would have been lived in dreadful & worsening health.
***********
About the NewsMax.com Health Alerts:
They do a nice job of emailing out some health news that may be important to you.
I don’t think they are perfect. But they mostly seem to be pretty good. And, they are quite current on their health news coverage.
I’ve not bought any of the advertised health products or information in the emails. So I cannot give you any feedback on those.
However, unless you are a right-wing, conservative Republican, I do not recommend their other non-health news coverage.
If you are though, you will probably like it.
To sign up for their NewsMax.com Health Alerts (or their non-health coverage if you like), go to:
http://www.newsmax.com/emailsub.cfm
Labels: cancer, cancer prevention, health warning, healthy aging, heart failure, soft drinks
posted by David at 12:51 PM
1 Comments:
Good post.
Post a Comment
<< Home