Uncovering Facts About Drinking Sugary Drinks
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011You don’t realise it yet, but in the next few minutes you are going to learn some of the sad truths about sugary drinks
It seems that drinking sugary drinks is highly dangerous and extremely harmful for your heart and your state of health, far more than you would think. Amazingly, drinking diet sodas seems to be as much as four times more dangerous to drink compared to drinking non sugary ones.
At the American Heart Association’s annual meeting there was some research presented that says that women who drank as little as two sugary drinks a day were nearly four times as likely to have high triglycerides which is the best predictor of heart risk for women. For these women the research seemed to show that even when they were not eating or drinking their blood sugar levels where highly likely to be weak. ( Shay, C., et. al. Beverages that are sweetened with sugar may increase cardiovascular risk in women.” American Heart Assoc. www.heart.org. Scientific Sessions. Nov. 13, 2011.)
The reason sugary drinks increase triglycerides is because they consist almost entirely of carbohydrates. A triglyceride is an ester obtained from glycerol by esterfication of three hydroxyl groups with fatty acids naturally occurring in animal and vegetable tissue an important energy source forming much of the fat stored by the body. The only option the body has when it is fed an abundance of this kind of carbohydrate is to store it as fat. To do this it turns the carbs int triglycerides and transports them through the blood to the liver where they are made into adipose cells and then stored.
Often times, this problem goes undetected because it is not visible. People who appear to be thin may still have this fat gathering around their organs and they do not even know it. It is called visceral fat. It causes inflammation and can elate to several inflammatory diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.
So sugar drinks are bad with the above results, however, the diet drinks may be even worse. Researchers have been studying some results from the San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging. These results that they discovered are very worrying. They followed 474 people for close to 10 years. They looked at the changes in waist size for people who drink diet sodas against people who do not (the ones drinking sugary drinks and the non sugary drink drinkers). The ones with a diet soda consumption had a larger increase in waist size and for the people drinking more than two diet sodas a day, they had belly growth of more than 500 percent. (Sansom, W. “New analysis suggests ‘diet soda paradox’ – less sugar, more weight.” Univ Tex SA Health Sci Ctr. www.uthscsa.edu. June, 2005. Retrieved Dec 1, 2011.)
So drinking diet sodas can give you a waist that is five times bigger than other people. Looking at this statistically, if you drink a diet soda everyday you are 65 percent more likely to become over weight in the next seven to eight years and 41 percent more likely to become obese.
Unfortunately, sodas are not the only baddies in the world of sugar drinks. All juices lose their goodness when they are packaded. Everything get destroyed when it is prepared to be packaged because it needs a shelf life. They have to pasteurise, homogenise or make it from concentrate which ruins the vitamins and increases the glycemic index of the beverage. Only when you chose the fruit yourself and crush the juice to make fresh drinks will you get all the health benefits from juice without making problems for your body.
Hmmm, so what can you drink? Tea is a great alternative, especially green tea which is full of anti oxidants. Tea is a beverage that can be hot or cold, can be taken with a squeeze of lemon or lime and if needed can have a natural sweetener like honey to give jus the right taste.
Plain water is the other alternative that has many combinations. Drink natural, adding ice if desired, or lemon or lime squeezed into it, or even some other fresh fruit squeezed into it to add a taste. Use cucumber slices to flavour the water, or add freshly squeezed cucumber bits, and even putting mint into the water gives it a refreshing taste.
Staying thin is no easy task in a world of sodas and juices advertised as being good for you.

