16 Reasons To Stop Drinking Soda here are 16 po werf ul reasons to give up soda drinking. Do you know the extent to which drinking carbonated, caffeinated, sugared, or artificially sweetened beverages harms your bod y? Giving up soft drinks can be one of the best things you can do to improve your health. 1 Soda Is Useless. First of all, there are no nutritionally beneficial components in soft drinks. Soft drinks mostly consist of filtered water and refined sugars. Yet the average American drinks about 57 gallons ofsoft drinks each year. 2 Weight Gain & ObesityMany people either forget or don't realize how many extra calories they consume in what they drink. Drinking a single 330 ml can a day of sugary drinks t ranslates to more than 1lb of weight gain every month. Several scientific studies have provided experiment al evidence that soft drinks are directly related to weight gain. T he relationship between soft drink consumption and bod y weight is so strong that researchers 2 calculate that for each additional soda consumed, the risk of obesity increases 1.6 t imes. According to the results of high quality study 3 reducing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages helped reduce body mass index in the heaviest teenagers. 3 DiabetesThis is a consequence of #2. Anything that promotes weight gain increases the r isk of diabetes. Drinking soda not o nly contributes to making people fat, but it als o stresses the bod y's ability to process sugar5. Some scientists now suspect that the sweet stuff may help explain why the number of Americans with type 2 d iabetes has tripled from 6.6 million in 1980 to 20.8 million today. Rapidly absorbed carbohydrates li ke high fructose corn syrup put more strain on insulin- producing cells than other foods. When sugar enters the bloodstream quickly, the pancreas has to secrete large amounts of insulin for the bod y to process it. Some scientists believe that the unceasing demands that a soda habit places on the pancreas may ultimately leave it unable to keep up with the bod y's need for insulin. Also, insulin itself becomes less effective at processing sugar; both conditions contribute to the r isk of developing diabetes. Interestingly, women who consumed a lot of fruit juice--which is high in natural fructose--were not at increased risk of diabetes, leading researchers to speculate that naturally occurring sugars may have different metabolic effects than added sugars. They also speculate t hat vitamins , minerals, fiber, and phytochemicals in fruit juices may have a protective effect against weight gain and diabetes, counterbalancing the adverse effects of sugar. Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School 4analyzed data from the Nurses' Health Study II, a trial tracking the health of more than 51,000 women. None of the participants had diabetes at the onset of the study in 1991. Over the following 8 years, 741 women were diagnosed with the disease. Researchers found that women who drank one or more sugary drinks a day gained more weight and were 83% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who imbibed less than once a month.
