Colas, Soft Drinks & Your Health
by Russell J. Martino, Ph.D. The Voice Of Health www.DrRussellsHealthAndWeightLossBlog.com
A powerful secret for developing excellent health is to get yourself in the habit of doing lots of things that are good for you and avoiding things that damage your health.
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One practical example of this is your food selection.
To build health and high energy and avoid tiredness and fatigue develop the healthy habit of choosing foods that are full of nutritional virtue and avoid foods that have little if any nutritional value but are loaded with calories and chemicals.
A famous nutritionist once said, "We dig our graves with our teeth", I like to put it this way; You determine your level of health and vitality with your food selections. Every bite and every swallow counts.
Food has a powerful effect on your hormones and your hormones have a powerful effect on your health.
As you come to fully understand how your food choices effect your health and begin applying your knowledge in your daily meal selections, you’ll be amazed at how quickly your health responds. Things get better fast!
Perhaps more powerfully than any other single factor, your daily food choices determine whether you are basically healthy and strong throughout your life or whether you suffer with average health and eventually fall victim to illness and disease.
Your daily food choices have a powerful effect on your energy level, blood pressure, kidney function, immune system strength, your bone density, the level of inflammation in your body, and much more.
If you want excellent, long-term health there’s little choice, you need to develop a basic understanding of how food, (and the ingredients added to food), effects your health. Only then will you be able to make consistently healthy choices.
With this in mind, lets discuss colas and soft drinks.
Of all the things that can inflict maximum damage on your health is the regular consumption of soft drinks or sweetened drinks of any sort.
When you understand what’s in this stuff and how drinking it pulls the rug right out from under your health, you’ll want to stay as far away from from these beverages as you can.
FOR STARTERS: All dark colored soft drinks and all cola drinks contain PHOSPHORIC ACID.
Drinking down a tall, cool glass of phosphoric acid laced with sugar or artificial sweetener is just a little less bad for you than gulping down a bottle of toilet bowl cleaner!
I’m sure it’s no surprise to learn that Drinking Acid Is Hazardous To Your Health; and that’s true whether you gulp down the phosphoric acid contained in cola drinks or copious quantities of the citric acid contained in clear soft drinks like Ginger Ale and all other clear or light colored soft drinks.
The Phosphoric acid in cola drinks is so strong that it reacts with the aluminum inside soft drink cans, dissolving microscopic bits of the toxic metal, causing it to mix right in with the soda.
If you’re up on the latest Alzheimer’s research, you know that aluminum is linked with the development of Alzheimer’s. There’s no proof that aluminum causes Alzheimer’s but it’s a fact that every Alzheimer’s victim has an unusually high concentration of Aluminum in their brain tissue. (Do you really want to risk it?)
Besides the phosphate you are exposed to in cola drinks, many other products are loaded with phosphates, including baked goods, cereals, cheeses and evaporated milk.
In high enough concentration, phosphates, block calcium absorption and flushes calcium out of your bones, which makes them thin, weak and brittle.
Phosphoric acid, which is one of the main ingredients in Coke, Dr.Pepper, Pepsi and all cola drinks, has a pH of 2.8, which is strong enough to dissolve a nail in about 4 days.
Have you ever used a carbonated cola drink to clean corrosion off a car battery? It works great! Just pour some over the corroded battery terminal and the corrosion melts off like magic. This is the same stuff people drink. Can you believe it!
The only reason the acid doesn’t dissolve your teeth, gums and esophagus is because your body makes a powerful base that neutralizes the acid almost the second it hits your mouth.
If not for this miraculous feat of human biochemistry, the phosphoric acid would dissolve your teeth with the same potent efficiency as it dissolves battery corrosion.
All it takes to neutralize a strong acid is a strong base. And as it turns out, the mineral calcium is perfect for the job.
Calcium is the primary raw material your body uses to make the base that neutralizes the acid and keeps your teeth from melting right out of your mouth. Thankfully, you have plenty of calcium to draw on, your bones are full of it.
Unfortunately, when calcium is sucked out of your bones to neutralize soft drink acid, your bones get thinner, weaker and brittle; doctors call this osteoporosis.
Based on the acid content alone, soft drinks should carry warning labels that read: WARNING: If you drink this sludge long enough your bones will rot.
The biochemistry involved here is simple and straight forward. Published medical studies document how efficiently the phosphoric acid in soft drinks deteriorates bone density.
One study of particular interest, was focused entirely on discovering why a group of healthy teenage girl athletes was experiencing an unusually high rate of bone fractures while playing their team sports.
The study, examined every imaginable factor that could account for the high bone fracture rate. Finally a common link was discovered; every member of the team consumed several soft drinks daily, including before and after practice.
Once this common factor was discovered, the mystery was solved. The researchers determined that calcium was being drawn out of these healthy teenagers bones to neutralize the soft drink acid resulting in weaker bones and the abnormally high fracture rate.
Imagine that! Just a few sodas a day was all it took to weaken the bones of healthy teenage athletes.
But don’t be too hasty in your judgment on soft drinks. All this negative press does not suggest that soft drinks are completely, utterly, absolutely and totally worthless.
The truth is, cola soft drinks have many excellent uses.
In some states the highway patrol carries a quart bottles of carbonated cola drinks in the truck to remove blood from the highway after a car accident. The acid eats it right off the road!
I mentioned that cola drinks are great for cleaning corrosion off car battery terminals: Try it! Just pour a little over the terminals and watch the corrosion melt away.
Cola drinks are great for loosening rusted bolts. Soak a cloth in your favorite cola and let it sit on the rusted bolt several minutes and wah lah, the bolt comes right out. This works almost as well as WD 40, which is an excellent product made for loosening rusted bolts.
Cola drinks are also great for cleaning road haze off your windshield; for this reason alone it’s good to carry some of the stuff in the trunk of your car!
From a health standpoint, the acid content in soft drinks is not the only thing to be concerned over, it is just one of many.
ALL SOFT DRINKS CONTAIN SUGAR and/or HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP – OR – they contain ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS
As we examine these ingredients, keep something very important in mind.
When it comes to your health, you are always going one direction or another. You’re either moving toward strength, health and vitality or you’re moving away from it, there’s no standing still, there’s no status quo.
Food ALWAYS has a powerful effect on your body chemistry and your body chemistry ALWAYS has a powerful effect on your health. If you want good health you have to choose your food and drink wisely.
Make no mistake about it, a diet rich in sugar or corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, refined carbohydrates and highly processed foods that are loaded with chemicals and preservatives will eventually destroy your health.
When you consume something high in sugar, in a matter of minutes the sugar is absorbed directly into your blood stream, causing your blood sugar level to rise.
If your blood sugar rises too high, too fast, you’ll pass out on the spot. To stop that from happening, your pancreas makes the powerful hormone, insulin, to stop the blood sugar from rising too high.
Insulin stops rising blood sugar in it’s tracks by literally turning the sugar into fat, so instead of having high blood sugar, you have high blood fat.
Common sense tells you that loading your cardiovascular system up with fat, sticky blood cannot possibly be healthy.
Now, instead of having high blood sugar to deal with, your body has to get rid of the fat that was made from the sugar, that came from the soft drink that your thought was such a good deal at just 98 cents for a 2 liter bottle.
To get rid of the blood fat your body, in it’s infinite wisdom, flips some metabolic switches that get you to STOP burning stored fat for energy and START burning the new fat that was just made from the sugar or corn syrup.
Since you won’t need all the extra energy the blood fat could produce, the blood fat that is not burned for energy is stored away in your fat cells, causing them to grow larger and causing you gain weight.
All regular soft drinks are extremely high in sugar and carbohydrates and drinking them causes a quick rise in blood sugar and an insulin response.
Living a dietary lifestyle that causes multiple insulin responses throughout the day is guaranteed to wreck your health.
Over time, it’s a sure bet that a diet high in sugar and carbohydrates will cause insulin abnormalities and insulin abnormalities are linked to obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and several forms of cancer. Just say no!
But what about artificially sweetened beverages and diet soft drinks?
Except for the absence of sugar or corn syrup and presence of the artificial sweetener, diet soft drinks are exactly the same as other soft drinks and are just as damaging to your health.
However, because of the chemical properties of artificial sweeteners, diet soft drinks, which many people believe are ok, are potentially even MORE DAMAGING to your health than their sugared cousins!
Diet soft drinks contain no sugar and few calories, but even so, drinking them stimulates an insulin response and research has taught us that consistently elevated blood insulin is the "little spark" that turns into the raging fire that burns down the forest.
Insulin abnormalities are linked to most of the worst diseases known. Consistently elevated blood insulin levels pose a gigantic health risk.
In addition to these problems, artificial sweeteners contain chemicals that break down in your body, cross the blood-brain barrier and cause real neurological damage.
In his book EXCITOTOXINS – The Taste That Kills, available at all the major bookstores, prominent neurologist Dr. Russell Blaylock explains exactly how chemicals in popular artificial sweeteners break down inside the body and cause serious health problems.
There is absolutely no health advantage to be gained by drinking an artificially sweetened beverage.
That fizzy sweet stuff is no good for you and, as far as I can tell, it has no redeeming value.
If soft drinks were insects, they’d be disease carrying mosquitoes.
If soft drinks were bugs, they’d be rabid cockroaches.
If they were plants, they’d be virulent poison ivy.
Regardless of how you think of them, they’re bad for you and should be avoided.
Soft Drinks Are Loaded With Nutritionally Empty Calories
Besides giving your the metabolic equivalent of 8 to 10 teaspoons of sugar, an average soft drink serving loads you up with about 200 extra calories.
A pound of fat contains 3500 calories. If you drink 2 soft drinks a day, you get enough calories to pile on a brand new shinny pound of waist-expanding body fat every 10 days.
Two soft drinks a day pump you up with about 400 extra calories. To put this into prospective, consider this.
A 150-pound man running at 6 miles an hour burns about 300 calories an hour. This means that for every 2 soft drinks you consume, unless you run for over an hour, you’re taking in more calories than you burn and are on your way to weight gain.
Seems like an awful lot of work for such a little bit of slurp doesn’t it?
Soft drinks are high in calories and low in nutrition. In fact, nutritionally empty soft drinks rob you of nutrients like a thief in the night.
Besides leeching calcium out of your bones, soft drinks cause your body to make insulin and insulin causes you to make adrenalin. Your body uses up a lot of precious essential nutrients making all these hormones.
Since the soft drinks add ZERO nutritional value, and stimulate the production of hormones that are made entirely from essential nutrients, it’s clear that drinking the stuff robs your body of nutrients.
Empty calorie foods can’t possibly satisfy your appetite because hunger is your body’s cry for nutrition, not your stomachs cry for potato chips.
Hunger is a signal from your brain, delivering the message that your body is crying out for nourishment. You need vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, amino acids and so on.
If you answer that cry by wolfing down junk food and soft drinks, your stomach is full, you’ll have hundreds of extra calories and you’ll be hungry again in no time because your body still need nutrients.
WHAT ABOUT ALL THAT FIZZ?
Those fizzy little bubbles in your soft drink are carbon dioxide molecules bubbling up through the sugar and acid and going back into the air.
When you swallow a carbonated liquid, some of the carbon dioxide bubbles up in your stomach, which is why you belch. But not all the carbon dioxide is released in your stomach.
As your delicious soft drink exits your stomach and begins the journey through your upper intestines, all the remaining carbon dioxide is released.
When carbon dioxide is released in the intestine, some of the molecules are actually absorbed through the intestine wall and end up taking a wild ride through your cardiovascular system. In other words, the stuff gets in your blood!
While it’s true that plants thrive on carbon dioxide, unless you happen to be a house plant, YOU NEED OXYGEN.
Since the main purpose of your heart and circulatory system is to deliver oxygen rich blood to your cells, it follows that anything the forces oxygen out of your blood cannot possibly be good for you. And it’s not!
Sipping soft drinks robs your body of oxygen and results in tiredness and fatigue you would not experience otherwise.
To add insult to injury, keep in mind that not all those pesky little carbon dioxide bubbles get sucked up in your blood. There are always some left over to do damage elsewhere!
The carbon dioxide that you didn’t belch or that didn’t get sucked up into your blood just builds up in the intestines and causes gas and discomfort.
If you’re not convinced by now that drinking acid that rots your bones and sucks oxygen out of your blood is not a good idea, it probably won’t matter to you that in addition to all the other macabre ingredients, most soft drinks contain chemical coloring agents and caffeine.
So there it is! Now you have the facts, everything you need to know to make up your own mind.
I wonder if you’re as excited about those Big Gulps as you used to be?
Is "the real thing" the right thing for you?
Before Gracie says good night, I have a little story to share with you.
Once upon a time the Dark Lord of Illness and Disease made a bet with God. The Dark Lord bet that he could talk millions of people into throwing away their health AND have them doing it with a smile.
What’s more, he bet God that he could get all these people to throw their health away by convincing them to drink beverages loaded with acid, carbon dioxide, sugar and chemicals.
To top it off, the Dark Lord bet God that besides getting them to drink acid, he’d have people paying big bucks to drink it and have most of them believing that drinking sugar-acid was part of what makes life sweet.
So how does the story turn out? Who won the bet?
I don’t know. But based on soft drink sales, my guess is that God practically fell down laughing as he took the bet and, at least for now, the Dark Lord is winning.
Here’s a final thought. Over two thirds of the surface of the earth is covered with water.
More that 50% of your body weight is water.
Every single cell in your body contains water, your blood is practically nothing but water and if deprived of water, you wouldn’t last a week.
There’s no beverage on earth more satisfying to your thirst than a tall, cool glass of pure, clean, healthy water. And besides that, water bestows upon you a number of impressive health benefits. But that’s the subject of another Special Report.
This is Russell J. Martino, The Voice of Health, reminding you that Health is a choice that only you can make and to be able to choose wisely, you must have good information. My goal is to help you make that choice every day and subscribing to my blog helps insure you will never miss a new post or new article. Subscribe Here: www.DrRussellsHealthAndWeightLossBlog.com
Until Next Time… All The Best To You And Yours!
Russell J. Martino, Ph.D Bringing You Health… At The Speed Of Life!
This is a small sample of the practical, usable information in 5 Steps To Optimal Health, a program thousands have benefited from since 1999 and I have updated continuously every year since. Learn more here: www.5StepsToOptimalHealth.com
Written by Dr. Russell J. Martino, Ph.DThe Voice Of Health
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