Food for Thought: The Evils of Soda

We've all heard it: Soda is B-A-D! I for one am a water drinker. But every once in a blue moon, temptation will sit in and I'll reach for some soda. Usually ginger ale, my soda of choice.

But HOW bad is soda?

Here are Eight Reasons to Give Up Soft Drinks for Good:

1. Soda makes you fat: Both regular and diet soft drinks are tied to obesity. In one study, people who drank diet sodas had a 70% greater increase in waist circumference over a few years compared to those who skipped soft drinks.

2. Soda depletes your body's oxygen supply: For every can of carbonated soda ingested, the amount of oxygen in the blood is decreased by 25% for up to three hours. If you are drinking several sodas per day, you are depriving yourself for a significant amount of oxygen.
3. Soda boosts your risk of serious disease: The extra belly fat that often comes with a soft drink habit is linked to heart disease and type 2 diabetes. A recent study in the Journal of Internal Medicine also tied a daily diet soda habit to a higher stroke risk.

4. Soda lowers your immunity: Sugar decreases immune function by reducing the ability of white blood cells to ingest and destroy bacteria. This lowered immune function can last for five hours or more after the ingestion of sugar.
5. Soda may cause cancer: New research from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health finds drinking two or more regular drinks per week may almost double your risk of pancreatic cancer. Researchers speculate that the sugar overload from regular soda triggers insulin production that fuels cancer cell growth.
6. Soda is bad for your teeth: The big culprit isn't sugar but soda's high acid content: phosphoric, malic, citric, and tartaric acid strip tooth enamel. Citrus-flavored soft drinks are the worst. They dissolve enamel up to five times more than colas.
7. Soda is bad for your bones: The same acids that are bad for your teeth also coax calcium from your bones.

8. Soda is especially bad for women: New research from the American Heart Association finds that women are more vulnerable than men to the harmful effects of drinking two or more sugar-sweetened drinks (including soda) per day. Soda-sipping women are likely to have a larger waist size, higher "bad" LDL cholesterol, higher levels of triglycerides (harmful fatty acids that can cause heart disease), higher blood sugar, and lower "good" HDL cholesterol. Even if they don't put on a pound.

Diet soda isn't that much better than the regular version.

Two recent studies found that being a diet soda junkie could actually put you at a greater risk of weight gain. Normal weight people who drank 3 servings or more of diet soda a day were at almost double the risk for becoming overweight or obese after seven to eight years compared to people who skipped diet drinks, according to researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. And people who consumed at least one daily serving of diet soda (versus none) were more likely to develop a high waist circumference, a condition linked with diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease, according to a recent study.
The American Dietetic Association says there's no conclusive evidence that diet sodas directly cause weight gain, but at many experts believe an artificial sweetener habit may overstimulate our taste receptors for sweetness. People crave more high-calorie sweet foods and fewer healthful, less sweet foods.

So hopefully next time you are ordering food at a restaurant you'll skip the soda and opt for water instead. Your entire body will thank you!