For years, advocates of natural health have been hammering away at the message that soda causes diabetes and obesity. The soda industry, meanwhile, has remained in denial mode, mirroring the ridiculous position of the tobacco industry that “nicotine is not addictive.” Soda doesn’t cause diabetes, the industry claims, and it’s perfectly safe to consume in essentially unlimited quantities.
The Corn Refiners Association has joined the denial with its own spin campaign that seeks to convince people High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is totally natural and completely harmless. HFCS is, of course, the primary sweetener used in sodas and soft drinks.
Now comes new research presented at the American Heart Association’s Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention annual conference in San Francisco. This new research reveals that over the last decade, soda consumption has conservatively caused:
• 130,000 new cases of diabetes
• 14,000 new cases of heart disease
• 50,000 more “life years” with heart disease over the last decade
“The finding suggests that any kind of policy that reduces consumption might have a dramatic health benefit,” said senior study author Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo (associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco).
The American Beverage Association, meanwhile, says this study hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal yet and therefore it doesn’t count. Soda consumption doesn’t cause diabetes or heart disease, they claim, because “…both heart disease and diabetes are complex conditions with no single cause and no single solution.”
It’s silly logic, of course: Diabetes obviously has a cause. It’s not some spontaneous disease that appears out of nowhere. And when you go looking for the cause, you obviously have to look at dietary factors since diabetes is a disease related to the consumption and metabolism of dietary sugars. Once you do that, sodas immediately raise a red flag because they’re liquid sugar in a highly-concentrated form that does not exist naturally in nature.
HFCS doesn’t grow on trees, in other words. Nature provides sugars locked into insoluble fibers that slow digestion and lower the effective glycemic index of sugars that are consumed. In nature, sugars are always combined with minerals, too, and many of those minerals help prevent diabetes and heart disease. But High-Fructose Corn Syrup is stripped of virtually all those minerals. It contains no fiber and no healing phytonutrients that you might encounter in plants. As a result, HFCS — sometimes dubbed “liquid Satan” — might be called a dietary poison that causes disease while contributing to nutritional deficiencies that accelerate disease.
Bone loss
Interestingly, this new study did not look at loss of bone density, which is another side effect of drinking soda. Due to the extremely high acidity of the HFCS sweetener combined with the phosphoric acid used in sodas, people who drink sodas often lose bone minerals and end up being diagnosed with osteoporosis (even at a relatively young age).
Other people end up with kidney stones due to all these minerals passing through the kidneys and contributing to the built up of mineral deposits there. Long-term soda consumers may even suffer from pancreatic cancer due to the extreme stress placed on the pancreas following the consumption of liquid sugars.
In all, soda consumption is linked to at least six serious diseases:
#1) Diabetes
#2) Obesity
#3) Heart disease
#4) Cancer
#5) Osteoporosis
#6) Kidney stones
That’s why taxing sodas is more than merely a way to raise money through soda sales; it’s also a way to dramatically reduce the cost of treating these diseases. It’s no surprise that several U.S. states are now starting to seriously consider slapping new taxes on sodas and other “junk” beverages.
That’s not the way I would prefer to see the situation handled, actually. The better option, in my view, would be to ban all soda advertising by effectively stripping Free Speech rights from corporations. Such rights belong only to individuals, not multi-billion-dollar corporations. Corporations whose products physically harm the health of the population at large should not be allowed to openly advertise and promote those products to the public. They can still sell them, they just can’t advertise them.