3 great reasons to NOT drink regular soft drinks....

Today's Post: Monday, 4-5-2010

Today I found another health email I subscribe to (the one from HSI) noted some studies that found that drinks sweetened with high fructose corn syrup did three things most people would want to avoid.

Duke Medical Center had a study showing such drinks likely caused such high triglycerides that drinking them dramatically increased the risk of getting the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease they cause when they are too high. And, no surprise, the people who drank the most HFCS sweetened drinks were at the most risk.

Princeton found, in rats, that those given water sweetened with HFCS -- as regular soft drinks are – gained MORE excess fat than those given water sweetened with sugar.

They also found that the rats drinking the water sweetened with HFCS had sharply increased triglycerides.

Since we already know that increased triglycerides indicate an INCREASE in the kind of small particle LDL that causes heart disease, these studies strongly suggests two conclusions.:

1. Drinking HFCS sweetened soft drinks that are now the universally sold kind and eating foods sweetened with HFCS will not only reliably make you gain weight as excess fat, it will do so MORE than if those foods and drinks were sweetened with sugar. So, if you want to avoid becoming MORE fat, come as close to NO consumption of regular soft drinks as you can manage. Drinking none at all is ideal if you dislike the idea of gaining MORE excess fat and pounds.

2. If you want to avoid heart disease and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease that driving your triglycerides to high levels often causes, avoid drinking HFCS sweetened soft drinks that are now the universally sold kind. They tend to cause these problems.


3. And, I also saw a separate news item that showed that people wanting to lose weight and become less fat who gave up drinking HFCS sweetened soft drinks that are now the universally sold kind not only became less fat and lost weight as you might expect, they did so with NO increase in hunger at all!

Unfortunately, giving up foods sweetened with HFCS required you to substitute a non-fattening food to be a successful fatloss method. If you just stopped eating those foods without that kind of substitution, the research found you WOULD become more hungry.

Of course, if you know what nonfattening foods to substitute and that you like eating, that’s not a problem. And, by eliminating the foods with HFCS, you will have lower triglycerides and better health. Even better, by substituting an nonfattening food for one sweetened with HFCS you can also stop eating them AND lose fat without becoming more hungry.

That’s 3 great reasons to NOT drink regular soft drinks.

You can stop getting FATTER; you can avoid triggering diseases due to high triglyceride levels; and you can LOSE some of the excess fat you have now!

(Note that diet soft drinks have been found to be just as fattening and as bad for you though for other reasons. So they are NOT a good substitute.)

Good substitutes include water; unsweetened tea, coffee, and/or cocoa; low sodium or salt free vegetable juice, cranberry juice, whole fresh fruit, and even occasional regular fruit juice which has no extra sugar added.