Soft drinks are as bad as smoking and diet soft drinks are worse....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 2-7-2012

Most people know that smoking is harmful to your health.

(Although few yet know how certain the harm is or that tobacco causing 30% of all cancers is its LITTLE problem. The BIG problem with smoking is the certain increase in heart disease and cut backs in your blood circulation from tobacco smoke exposure.)

But how many people know that drinking soft drinks is very close to that harmful?

It should be close to 100 %. Needless to say it’s dramatically less than that.

Then too, millions of people drink diet soft drinks in hopes of getting less fat than if they drank regular soft drinks. Oops!!

How many of THOSE people know diet soft drinks fatten MORE than regular and are also that harmful?

Both the sweeteners and many of the other ingredients in soft drinks are harmful.

Here’s the summary in three parts.

Ingesting excess sugar, once thought to be relatively harmless even by doctors, turns out to lower HDL and increase triglycerides. But, thanks to research done at Harvard, we now know that means that ingesting things that do that increase the amount of small particle LDL which is a direct cause of heart disease.

The main single source of excess sugar today is from people drinking regular soft drinks. And the high fructose corn syrup in them is a form of sugar that is even more fattening than regular sugar. A recent study found that excess calories even from healthy foods can make you fat. BUT, a study found that high fructose corn syrup is a bad exception -- with the same number of calories you will get a LOT fatter from high fructose corn syrup calories!

What about diet soft drinks? People who drink them don’t know they act as triple strength drugs to massively boost their appetite for real sugar. Based on the research results, they then find a way to eat even more sugary calories than they would have from drinking regular soft drinks. And, so far, the health impact is as bad or worse. Research has documented diet soft drinkers get fatter and grow the fat in their waist area even more than people who drink regular soft drinks.

In addition to these drinks most people think are normal and harmless being a direct cause of getting fat and causing heart disease, these same metabolic effects help cause type 2 diabetes.

Two other key points.

1. Like tobacco and its smoke, drinking soft drinks helps cause many other health problems.

But two are worth special mention because they are unusually nasty to the people who get them. (The others aren’t far behind.)

a) Imagine being unable to move because your leg bones are broken and can’t support your weight. Also imagine having pains all over your body from small breaks in your other bones. It’s called osteoporosis and the drugs for it have dreadful side effects and do little to fix it.

If you eat enough foods with calcium and magnesium and get enough walking and other exercise and take or get enough sunlight to wind up with 3,000 or more iu of vitamin D3 a day, normally you’d not get osteoporosis.

(Drug hormone replacement for women at menopause was thought to help prevent it but was proven to be harmful for other reasons. Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is thought by many to be as effective in preventing osteoporosis and to not have those side effects.)

But today in BOTH men and women many people already have some or a lot of osteoporosis. Most of them have no clue they do either. Why?

Every day they drink soft drinks that taste a bit spicier and refreshing because they contain phosphoric acid. Oops! Phosphoric acid leaches both calcium and phosphorous from bones. It’s like taking a daily drug that causes your bones to weaken structurally and doing it every day of every week for years. (Both regular and diet soft drinks contain phosphoric acid.)

b) Imagine getting someone to get thousands of tiny stainless steel needles and somehow firing them into many of the smaller joints in your hands and feet. Sounds like something out of a horror movie. It’s called gout. And the needles in your joints are actually crystals of uric acid.

Something that horrible would be worth missing wouldn’t you say?

Men who ingested the most fructose, more than doubled their chances of getting gout researchers in two separate locations found.

Who ingests the most fructose today?

People who drink regular soft drinks more than 7 times a week and people who drink diet soft drinks that often and then eat foods sweetened with high fructose corn syrup because of how much their craving for sugar went up.

2. The MUCH better news.

If you have been drinking soft drinks for years because you thought like most people still do that they are normal and harmless, you have a way to lose a good bit of fat without getting hungrier at all!

Ten to fifty pounds or more of fat now on your body is there from drinking soft drinks. But if you switch to water, soda water only, tea, or coffee without sugar or excess cream, you’ll cut off all that calorie intake. But not only will you not be hungrier, you’ll actually be somewhat less hungry and with fewer sugar cravings. That’s true if you have been drinking regular soft drinks. But the huge drop in sugar cravings you’ll get from stopping diet soft drinks is even more.

Hunger free fat loss is the main key to losing fat and never having it return – permanent fat loss.

Simply not drinking any soft drinks any more for people who drink them now is just about the most effective and hunger free way to do just that.

As extra benefits, your heart health protection will go up and your chances of getting type 2 diabetes and several other diseases will go down.