When consumed excessively, sugary drinks can be extremely bad for your health. Some sources of sugar are much worse than other, but sugary drinks are by far the worst.
This includes everyone’s favourite fizzy pop, fruit juices, sweetened coffees, milkshakes and even some smoothies. But what exactly is it that makes them so bad?
Weight Gain
Sugary drinks are designed to taste great but not to make you feel full. They are commonly filled with sucrose or table sugar, which does not stimulate the hormone that makes you feel full as much at glucose, which is formed when you digest starchy foods. That’s why consuming liquid sugar simply tops up your calorie count with no useful effects whatsoever.
One study found that daily servings of sugar-sweetened drinks to children caused a 60% increase in their risk of obesity.
Fat Store
Glucose can be easily metabolised (processed) by every cell in your body, whereas normal sugar can be turned into fat storage by your liver if not metabolised, resulting in excessive weight-gain. In some cases, over time, this can cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Addictive
Sugar has been proven to be a very addictive substance. Studies in rats indicated that it stimulates a feeling of pleasure by releasing dopamine in the brain. In humans, it’s thought that bingeing on sugar has the same effect as hard drugs and for those who have addictive tendencies, sugary food may be extra hard to resist.
Heart Disease
It’s a well-established fact that consuming too much sugar can increase a person’s risk of heart disease, amongst other health conditions such as high blood sugar levels and diabetes. Human studies have recently suggested a very strong link between sugar intake and heart disease risk in all populations, with one study showing that people who drank just one sugary drink per day were 20% more at risk of having or dying from a heart attack compared to those who never drank sugary drinks.
Increased Cancer Risk
Drinking sugary drinks goes hand in hand with more serious health conditions such as cancer and there’s plenty of evidence to show that the link is very real.
A study in over 60,000 adults showed that those who drank two or more sugary drinks per week were a staggering 87% more likely to develop pancreatic cancer than those who avoided sugary beverages altogether.
Teeth
Sugar is bad for your teeth – a well-known fact! It contains phosphoric and carbonic acid, which make your teeth very vulnerable to decay. The combination of acid in soda drinks is what makes them particularly harmful and it provides very easily digestible energy for the bacteria in your mouth, weakening your teeth more and more over time.
The bottom line is, drinking high levels of sugary drinks does nothing but damage your health. If you’re looking to lose weight, one of the first things you should consider doing is cutting these out completely and replacing them with sugar free alternative, preferably water!
