As we have learned, the strength and popularity of soda around the world is no fluke. After several decades worth of catchy marketing campaigns, Coca-Cola remains as American a brand as you will find and the company remains a giant in the beverage industry. The only difference between its rise to popularity in the 1940s to today is that now we have the facts and they are indisputable with regard to how bad drinking soda is for your overall health.
One of the simplest things you can do to improve your health is to drink more water. If Coke consumers just traded in their red can for a glass of water, aspects of their health would improve almost immediately. With sugar as a base ingredient in this product, it shouldn’t be too hard to identify some of the negative effects that Coke has on the body. From weight gain to increasing your chances of becoming a type two diabetic, is it even worth the gamble to consume a beverage that could cause this? When you really boil it down, the only positive is satisfying your taste buds for a couple of minutes. That’s how easily an addiction to sugary beverages can start.
Here are a few quick facts on what exactly we are drinking and a sugary beverage is capable of doing. If you replace a glass of water with a can of coke every day for a year, on average you will see a weight gain of 18 pounds. If you decide to follow this same protocol of one coke a day for a year, before you add any additional food or drink into the equation over that year, you will have already eaten 32 pounds of sugar. Think about lifting a 32 pound bag of anything; it’s heavy! Now consider that bag is 32 pounds of sugar and you ate the entire bag by simply drinking one 12 ounce can of Coke a day for a year. Those two facts alone should terrify you.
In a 12-ounce can of Coke, there are roughly 40.5 grams of sugar. When you break this down, 40.5 grams is ten teaspoons, equal to 20 sugar cubes. You would literally be better off just eating 20 sugar cubes than to drink that 12-ounce soda. At least when you decide to just eat the sugar, you are not including all the other preservatives, sodium and other wonderful ingredients included in the beverage.
Now, we all know that while you will most likely find that red can in your friend’s refrigerator, for those of us who need more than 32 pounds of sugar a year, of course they would offer larger sized beverages! There is a size to satisfy everyone! The 20-ounce bottles contain 65 grams of sugar and the one liter bottle you can find at almost any gas station around the world, contains 108 grams of sugar. The cups you can find at most gas stations that offer fountain sodas can go all the way up to 64 ounces. This is a ridiculous and unnecessary amount of soda for anyone, even when diluted with ice. There is not one person walking this planet that should ever consume that much soda.
Some of you may ask: How do they continue to pull this off with what we know about the dangers of soda? This is a great question. Keep in mind, Coca-Cola has this down to a science from the marketing to identifying the precise satiation levels in the body to keep us coming back for more. We have a monster out there and its name is Coke. Should we just continue to turn a blind eye to those of us that are slowly poisoning themselves with over consumption or should we fight for change? Is the irrefutable science that proves this is poisonous to the human body enough to hopefully get more people to open their eyes to what they are really doing to themselves? Let’s hope for a move in the right direction.
