Healthy Recipe Doctor

What’s wrong with drinking lots of soda each day? Let me count the ways…

It seems to me, handing 16-ounce bottles of sweetened soda to a nation that is in the middle of an obesity epidemic may not be the best idea. When I think of “junk food” pretty much the first thing I think of is sweetened soda and drinks because it’s the perfect example of a food/beverage that contributes calories without any nutritional value.

Study after study is coming out adding weight to my argument. The latest was in the journal Circulation (2007; 116: 480-488). Consumption of sweetened soft drinks has been linked to obesity in children and adolescents but these researchers set out to discover whether it increases metabolic risk in middle-aged individuals.

(I’m now confirming that I, in fact, do not yet qualify as “middle aged” if I am technically in my “mid-forties,” right? …but I digress.)

According to their results, drinking one or more soft drink per day was associated with increased odds of developing metabolic syndrome (obesity, increased waist circumference, impaired fasting glucose, higher blood pressure, high triglycerides, and low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. And that was after adjustments were made for age, sex, physical activity, smoking, dietary intake of saturated fat, trans fat, fiber, magnesium, total calories, and glycemic index.

If you are a soda drinker and you can’t imagine ever cutting it out of your life, cut back on it as far as you can. There are all sorts of other beverage options out there, many of which are the opposite of junk food because they offer nutritional benefits with little or no calories, like green or black tea; even coffee is suspected of having health attributes.

Related Topics:

• Help for Soda Lovers
• WebMD Video: Metabolic Syndrome

Technorati Tags: soda, pop, metabolic syndrome, diet, healthy drinks, health and wellness