January/February 2005 Alternative Health
Reasons to Avoid Commercial Soft Drinks!

by Keith Post, ND

Commercial soft drinks have become part of the fabric of modern Western society, but so have dental cavities, hypoglycemia, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, poor digestion, Alzheimer's disease, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, cancer, depression, insomnia and multiple sclerosis. Therefore, it behooves us to examine these phenomena with an objective and scientifically open mind, asking ourselves whether soft drinks help to improve the quality of life or do they actually damage it beyond repair.

First of all, soft drinks actually steal water from the body. This is because they have a diuretic action, causing your body to urinate more in order to process the high amount of sugars and chemicals. In fact, in order to replace your net water loss and prevent intracellular dehydration, it is estimated that you would need to drink at least two cups of water for every cup of soft drink consumed, and more if the drink also contains caffeine. This constant denial of the body's need for pure water leads to chronic intracellular dehydration, which is a keynote of aging. This also weakens the immune system, so it is especially important to avoid them when you are ill!

Secondly, the sugars cause the pancreas to produce an abundance of insulin, which then leads to the "sugar crash" of reactive hypoglycemia. Over time, however, the pancreas becomes progressively more exhausted, to the point where it is unable to produce enough insulin to control blood sugar levels. At that point, a diagnosis of diabetes is often made. Please note that excessive sugar intake, in general, can be particularly disruptive to children, leading to mood swings, behavioral disorders and recurrent infections.

The third major reason to avoid soft drinks is that the phosphates in many of them cause leaching of vital alkaline minerals out of the body. This leads to big problems down the road! For example, a chronic deficiency of the two minerals potassium and magnesium will result in arrhythmias and the development of heart disease, whereas calcium being leached out of the bones and teeth leads invariably to osteoporosis and dental cavities. Also, the lack of sufficient mineral substrate means that the enzymes and vitamin complexes (which are actually coenzymes) within your body cannot perform their essential life processes. Soft drinks have been shown to be able to remove the rust from a car bumper or other metal surface. Do you really want a substance like that in your body?

Fourth, soft drinks can also severely interfere with normal digestive processes. In fact, the combination of caffeine and high amounts of sugar virtually turns off digestion for several hours at a time altogether. The net result is that your body derives zero nutritional value from the food that was taken in previously. Also, drinking caffeinated soft drinks with fried foods, which already require more time and energy to digest, creates a very difficult situation for the body to deal with.

Here is a fifth reason. Soft drinks are so acidic that they can eat through the liner of an aluminum can if it sits on a shelf or in the heat too long. This is a problem, because aluminum toxicity has been implicated in Alzheimer's disease. In fact, ALL of the Alzheimer's patients who have been autopsied so far have been found to have high levels of aluminum in their brain cells!

A sixth reason to avoid them is that the high acidity of soft drinks predisposes one to osteoarthritis, cancer and other chronic degenerative diseases. Here is why. The human body naturally exists at a balanced pH of around 7.0. Soft drinks, however, have an average pH of 2.5. And, since pH is a logarithmic measure, that means that soft drinks are thousands of times more acidic than the body's natural pH. Therefore, if the innate buffering systems are overcome through habitual use, acid wastes will eventually accumulate in the tissues, joints and around the organs. Those suffering with chronic degenerative illnesses tend to have an acidic extracellular fluid pH, which becomes progressively lower as their disease develops, and the extracellular fluid pH of the cancer patient is always low.

But, you might be thinking, what about diet drinks? Unfortunately, they usually contain the additive aspartame, which is a sweet-tasting substance that somehow received FDA approval on the basis of industry-funded studies. In fact the FDA denied aspartame approval for over 8 years until the newly appointed FDA commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes overruled the final scientific review panel, approved aspartame, and then went to work for the public relations firm of G.D. Searle, the initial owner of aspartame.

Aspartame has been reported to have the potential to be extremely neurotoxic, leading to conditions such as depression, insomnia, confusion, behavioral changes and even seizures! It has also been linked to symptoms that mimic multiple sclerosis, as well as a host of other neurological diseases. It requires no digestion and quickly enters the brain and central nervous system at abnormally high levels.

Aspartame has also been reported to inhibit pancreatic function, possibly contributing to the epidemic of diabetes that we are experiencing and helping to explain why those who use it habitually are becoming increasingly obese! This is now being called "aspartame disease" by the alternative press, and the final effects on human health are still unknown. To date, though, the FDA has received more than 10,000 complaints about aspartame alone! That is 80% of their total complaints concerning food additives.

As the evidence on Aspartame accumulates, some soft drink manufacturers are switching to Sucralose (trichlorogalactosucrose). This substance is produced by chlorinating sucrose (sugar); three chlorine atoms are substituted for three hydroxyl groups. According to Consumers Research Magazine, chlorinated molecules also serve as the basis for pesticides such as DDT, accumulate in body fat, and are considered to be carcinogens. However, the manufacturer Johnson & Johnson claims that "sucralose passes through the body unabsorbed."

Research animals fed sucralose exhibited the following symptoms: shrinkage of the thymus glands (up to 40%), enlarged liver and kidneys, atrophy of lymph follicles in the spleen and thymus, reduced growth rate, decreased red blood cell count, hyperplasia of the pelvis, extension of the pregnancy period, aborted pregnancy, decreased fetal body and placental weights, and chronic diarrhea. Sleep disturbances in humans have also been reported.

To summarize, commercial soft drinks are chemical soups that are just about the WORST thing that you could put into your body. So, if you plan to live a long and healthy life, it would be best to avoid them!

Keith Post, ND is a board-licensed naturopathic physician practicing in Portland, Oregon. You can call him at (503-244-5708, request his monthly newsletter at keithp@pcez.com or read his writings online at www.pcez.com/~keithp/page5.htm