The Truth About Sugary Drinks that No One Talks About
It was bad for you then! It’s even worse for you now! - Sweetened beverages: One of the biggest enemies of your health.
The Truth About Sugary Drinks That No One Talks About
It was bad for you then! It’s even worse for you now! Sweetened beverages: One of the biggest enemies of your health.
By Dr. C.M. Curtis
04/22/2024
No, I didn’t invent the wheel. But I was there when it happened. The point is, I’ve been around for a while.
I remember when soda pop (I will refer to it as soda) was an occasional treat. As a child; even as a teenager, I never knew anyone who had soda in their home. If we went to a community celebration, a church party, or some such event, there would be a cooler with bottles of pop (soda) available. These bottles were small in comparison to today’s sizes, and the liquid therein was sweetened with sugar—harmful, but not as harmful as the high fructose corn syrup and chemical sweeteners found in the soda that people consume by the gallon these days.
My parents knew very little about human physiology, even so, they seemed to understand that soda was not good for the body, therefore we rarely indulged in it. I estimate that in my youth I drank no more than two or three bottles of pop in a year. And it was always orange or grape soda, maybe cherry or lemon-lime; my parents were smart enough to protect me from caffeine.
In those forgotten days soda was sold only in glass bottles, and, compared to today’s oversized offerings, they were small bottles. 7up took its name from the fact that it came in 7-ounce bottles. Then Pepsi, a small company at the time, in a bid to out-sell Coke, came out with the 12-ounce bottle, double the size of Coke’s 6-ounce bottle, but sold at the same price—5 cents.
Coke responded with what they called their King Size 10 and 12-ounce bottles. Imagine calling 10 ounces of soda king-size today.
When convenience stores began springing up on every street corner in America, the stores began advertising increasingly larger sizes of soda cups. If my memory is accurate, the size grew to 16 ounces, then 20, then 24 ounces. At this point, I was in my early 20s and only an occasional soda drinker, but, though I knew nothing about health or nutrition, something in my mind said this soda thing was getting out of hand. It just seemed to me that it couldn’t be healthy to drink that much soda pop.
Today, you can walk into any convenience store and come out with a plastic cup containing a full 64 ounces of the lethal liquid. Compare that to the old 6-ounce bottles.
As the amount of soft drinks consumed by the average person increased, our society saw a commensurate increase in the rates of obesity and all degenerative diseases.
I realize that soda cannot exclusively be blamed for the horrific epidemic of obesity, type ll diabetes, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, autoimmune disease, etc. that we are experiencing but it is undoubtedly responsible for much of it.
Some people never drink water. They don’t even like it.
The liquids they drink are always sweetened with high fructose corn syrup or a chemical sweetener and generally contain carbonation, caffeine, and a number of other health-destroying factors.
How does soda kill you? Let me count the ways.
Let’s begin with the sweeteners. Soda is sweetened with one of the following: