While we all love to drink those fizzy, sugary, flavoured canned and bottled drinks to quench our thirst and give us an energy hit, there are many reasons why we shouldn't drink them at all. Od course, the non-alcoholic drinks industry is huge and they are not about to go undermining their own products by telling you anything other that what you want to hear about them. meaning that the message that everyone is getting about fizzy soda pop drinks is that they're great to drink and everybody will have a good time if you all drink more.

That, of course is pure hype and advertising manipulation to get you to want the product enough to go and buy it. Its the same with everything these days. The television is awash with commercials for just about anything you care to name and hardly surprisingly, most of it you don't need. But you'll go out and buy it all anyway because the TV told you to!

Here, I'm taking a look at one very specific product from the proliferation of TV commercial madness and that's fizzy, soda drinks and I'll tell you why soda is bad for you.

Soda Bad

Non-alcoholic fizzy drinks that Americans call soda and the British don't are all much of a muchness in that they all contain more or less the same colelction of ingredients with different flavourings and either sugar or sugar substitutes, or artificial sweeteners to make the drinks taste sweet. Here is the first and biggest health risk from drinking this stuff.

The sugar or sugar substitute laden soda drinks are on one level when it comes to being really bad for you, in that the amount of sucrose that these drinks contain is high enough to raise your blood sugar levels to dangerous highs upon drinking them. Luckily for you, your body has a rescue mechanism called the spleen which contains a gland that secretes insulin. Insulin is the substance that regulates blood sugar levels and when you get too high a dose following a can of soda, a similarly large dose of insulin gets released into the bloodstream to counter its effects.

Its is fine if it only happens occasionally, as your body is designed to cope with these situations and clean up the mess you make. But when you do it on a regular basis, and its not uncommon for people to drink their way through several cans of soda every day, then the system that produces insulin gets overworked to the extent that you could be risking becoming diabetic, with type II diabetes becoming ever more wodespread.

If that's not bad enough, all that yo-yoing of blood sugar levels has another side effect in that it causes the body to store all that excess sugar as fat, in cells located in your belly. Ah, I see I have hit a moment of recognition! Yes, there are ads for belly fat reduction everywhere you look.

Why do you think that is?

Extensive research has been done ob the effects of belly fat and why it gets put there and not in other places. One of the results of those researches have uncovered disturbing evidence to suggest that people with increased belly fat are more susceptible to contracting colon cancer as well as other related cancers. This is because belly fat is deemed an "active" fat which secretes substances that nourish cancer cells to grow faster.

Artificial Sweeteners to Die For

Now lets turn our attention to fizzy soda drinks that are sweetened with artificial sweeteners. These are usually Aspartame or Sorbitol these days. The artificial sweetener of choice used to be saccharin before the development of the former two, but its links with cancer have been known since the early part of the 20th century and in fact it has been banned on several occasions by governments around the world, most notably the United States, who reinstated it after pressure from diabetic groups who lobbied Congress amd won as far back as the 1930s.

Isn't it interesting to find out how long governments know about certain things and still manage to keep them quiet enough so the general public are not aware!

Well, back to our new friend Aspartame. I'll leave Sorbitol alone for reasons that will become clear soon enough.

If you thought saccharine was a horror story in the making, its got nothing on this contender for most widely used poison on the planet! You may not realise it, but Aspartame is the artificial sweetener that sweetens nearly every sugar free product that is currently produced. It would be fine if it was perfectly safe, because it sweetens products without leaving any discernable after taste as saccharine used to, but it is not. It is actually very far from safe and relatively so few people understand this that its scary.

Just like the untold millions of people smoked and the thousands who died of cancer because they were never told the dangers, and the millions who still smoke because they think they won't get cancer, millions of people trust government reports that Aspartame is perfectly safe. It is certainly not safe

From a health aspect, Aspartame (and Sorbitol) tricks the brain into making you to feel hungry, so even though you think you are helping your diet by drinking sugar free soda, you are actually hampering it because you are more likely to ewant to eat more and gain weight.

Aspartame contains wood alcohols that become unstable at temperatures over 83 degree Fahrenheit and convert to formaldehyde. This is the stuff undertakers embalm corpses with before burial. It is carcinogenic, which means it can cause cancer. Aspartame in its natural state has been linked with damage to cell DNA leading to healthy cells becoming cancerous.

Well, try googling "Aspartame dangers" and then tell me its safe.

You may brush this information off as mere scare-mongering, but so did all those millions of smokers. The hospitals are still full of lung and throat cancer patients that wouldn't be there if they had taken notice of what they were told about the dangers of smoking.