It's safe to say a lot of people like a lot of soda. Over 1.8 billion bottles of Coca Cola are sold every single day around the world, and nearly half of all Americans are drinking at least one daily glass of soda. We all know this is pretty bad, but as long as the rest of your diet is healthy, it's not going to cause you too much damage. But what would happen if you only drank soda? Short answer: wow that's gross. Slightly longer answer: the boys at AsapSCIENCE have got you covered.
First up, how about a whole lot of acid swishing around over your teeth? From the get-go, the high acid content of soft drink will start to erode the enamel of your teeth, and the harmful bacteria in your plaque will start feeding on all the sugar, which could lead to cavities. Once you've finished the can, you'll have consumed around 46 grams of sugar, and as soon as it touches your tounge, the cerebral cortex in your brain will make you feel awesome and ask for more.
Now, say you replace your eight daily glasses of water with Coke. How's an extra 5,432 calories a day sound? To put that in perspective, that's like eating a bit less than two large pizzas-worth of extra calories every day.
And speaking of pizza, I bet you feel like one after all that soda, right? As the video above explains, researchers have found that when a person drinks a soft drink, they're more likely to eat more calories in their food, mainly because it can often feel like a drink can't be that bad for your weight, so you don't think to compensate for that with the kinds of meals you're eating.
To make matters worse, most soda is sweetened by high fructose corn syrup, which tastes amazing, but our bodies don't actually really know how to metabolise it that effectively. Unlike other types of sugars, corn syrup has been shown to increase liver fat, which leads to a significantly higher risk of cardiovascular disease, and they don't stimulate the hormones insulin and leptin. This is good news for anyone selling a meal deal, because the job of these hormones is to signal to the body when we're full.
A recent study has found that gradually reducing sugar in sweet drinks could prevent 1 million cases of obesity in the UK, and similar figures have been reached when looking at diabetes. So what if we all just ditched sugary soft drinks altogether and started a new, sugar-free soda-filled life?
Well, that's not a great idea either, strangely enough. Watch the latest episode of AsapSCIENCE above to find out why even sugar-free soft drinks have been linked to weight gain, and yep, even ageing. And if you want to see what happens to the body when you take away even natural sugars found in food, check this out: