Are We Finally Listening About Sodas??

Finally, some good news regarding sodas! (From a health perspective, there usually isn’t anything “good” to talk about concerning them…) In recent months, there have been numerous reports confirming that overall consumption of carbonated soft drinks (soda) has been steadily declining. As a doctor, I couldn’t be happier because they are frequently a contributing factor to many health conditions that we see in the office such as weight issues, diabetes and gastrointestinal problems. The fact that Americans are slowing down their consumption gives me hope that more people are realizing that regular soda is nothing more than liquid candy (and diet sodas aren’t any better for you with all their chemicals).

Over the last 20 years, sales of full-calorie soda have dropped by more than 25%. Soda consumption, which grew mainly from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, is now experiencing a sustained decline. Researchers found that 30.1 percent of adults reported drinking sugar-sweetened beverages at least once a day in 2013, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2010, 50.6 percent of adults reported drinking at least one sugar-sweetened beverage a day, according to the report, which gathered data from survey respondents in 23 states.

Drinking at least one sugar-sweetened beverage daily was most common among 18- to 24-year-olds, with 43.3 percent of all people in this age group reporting that they consume a sugary drink at least once daily. Adults in this age group were 2.3 times more likely to have a sugary drink once a day than adults ages 55 and over, according to the report. Other groups in which consumption was high included African-Americans (39.9 percent); men (34.1 percent); people who reported being unemployed (34.4 percent); and people with less than a high school education (42.4 percent).

Part of this declining trend is due to people making smarter beverage choices. More people are opting for bottled water to quench their thirst instead of sugar-laden drinks, which is a great shift as most people do not consume enough water daily and are living in a state of partial dehydration. Ironically, this can be exacerbated by the caffeine in sodas as it has a natural diuretic effect on the body and will cause you to lose more water. Moving away from sodas also offers other benefits as well. The carbonation in sodas produces a very strong acidic environment (just search for the videos online that show people using it to take the rust off of metal!) that the body will attempt to buffer. One way it does this is with calcium from the body’s own supply. If it takes it from our bones, it can contribute to osteoporosis and osteopenia. If it takes it from our muscles (and remember the heart is a muscle!), we can get muscle cramps or contraction problems. Lastly, the option for diet soda in the attempt to avoid excessive calories does not offer any real health benefit. In addition to causing hormonal and neurological issues, the artificial sweeteners still drive the insulin response in the body in response to the perceived sweetness. However, since there are no calories (sugar) for the body to act upon, it leaves the body looking for more and this has been shown to lead to overeating.

Overall, there really are no benefits to drinking sodas and the negative effects they produce on the body far outweigh any perceived short-term enjoyment value one would get from consuming them. Stick to pure water or other natural alternatives like cold-pressed fruit and vegetable juices or coconut water and give your body a healthier hydration option.

And for a little (truthful) humor:

In Health, 

Dr. Brad Niewierowski 

How Soda Effects the Body

The majority of our patients come in to the office with the desire to lose some weight in addition to improving their health on various levels. While hormone balances, stress and lifestyle factors all play a part in whether we gain or lose weight on a week by week basis, one major determining factor will simply be how much food we are putting into our bodies. If we are taking in more calories than our body requires to maintain a healthy body weight and composition, it simply has no choice other than to store the excess as body fat.

As patients go through our program, most are surprised to realize how much they have been overeating on a day to day basis. One area that routinely will undermine the ability to maintain a healthy weight is not realizing just how many calories we take in from certain foods. And while the word “food” really shouldn’t be used for sodas, since they do contribute calories to daily intake, they have to be put into this classification. It can be easy to forget how many calories liquids contain since they go down easy and don’t have the bulk that solid foods do. But take a look at an average soda. There are approximately 10 teaspoons of added sugar in a single can of cola. That’s an easy 160 calories, and most people can drink more than one can in a day so they can add up quickly.

Beyond the excessive calorie load though, we also need to understand what effects that type of “food” has on our body, because not all calories are created equal. Most sodas use high fructose corn syrup as their main ingredient, which not only causes blood sugar to spike, but also promotes inflammation in the body. According to one researcher, the intense sweetness of Coca-Cola as a result of its high sugar content should make us vomit as soon as it enters the body. However, the phosphoric acid in the beverage dulls the sweetness, enabling us to keep the drink down.

Due to the high sugar content we get an insulin spike, which causes the body to store all the excess sugar as fat. Shortly thereafter, once the caffeine has been absorbed, you get a rise in your blood pressure which causes the liver to dump more sugar into the bloodstream and you continue to run off the “sugar high”. While this is going on, your body is using it’s own stores of calcium (and magnesium and zinc) to buffer against the acidity from the carbonation (acid) in the soda. The negative here is that as you urinate later (a diuretic effect from the caffeine), you’ll be excreting all those minerals, plus some electrolytes as well, that are supposed to be helping build strong bones and keeping your body fluids in balance. Then of course you’ll get the sugar crash after about an hour, leaving you hungry and/or irritable and more prone to overeating or going through the above nasty cycle again if you reach for another soda.

After learning all that, is it really worth it when there are so many other healthier beverage options available? Coconut waters have gained in popularity recently, and there are many options when it comes to natural juices and smoothies that can deliver plenty of nutrients and also include some fat and protein to help slow down the sugar absorption. Bottom line: be smart when it comes to your beverage selections. They can easily be a source of harmful calories for your body that have multiple negative effects on our health, but they can also offer multiple benefits if you choose your drinks wisely.

In Health, 

Dr. Brad Niewierowski 

Ref: How Coca-Cola affects your body when you drink it.  http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/297600.php

Why Are Americans Becoming Wary of Aspartame?

As more research links aspartame to health risks, increasing numbers of people are looking to avoid it in their diets. That's why Pepsi was proactive in removing it from their diet soda.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved aspartame for use in dry foods in 1981 and as a general artificial sweetener in 1996.

Unlike other artificial sweeteners that move through the body without being digested, aspartame can be metabolized by your body and exerts a number of concerning effects. For instance, aspartame has been found to increase hunger ratings compared to glucose or water and is associated with heightened motivation to eat (even more so than other artificial sweeteners like saccharin or acesulfame potassium).

For a substance often used in "diet" products, the fact that aspartame may actually increase weight gain is incredibly misleading. Aspartame also exerts changes on the microbial composition in your gut, the consequences of which are unknown.

However, emerging evidence suggests gut microbes play a role in metabolic diseases that aspartame is known to increase, pointing to alteration of gut microbial composition as one of its mechanisms of harm. According to research published in PLOS One:

"Regular consumption of artificially sweetened soft drinks is associated with disorders of the metabolic syndrome, including abdominal obesity, insulin resistance and/or impaired glucose tolerance, dyslipidemia and high blood pressure.

In particular, daily diet soda consumption (primarily sweetened with N-a-L-aspartyl-L-phenylalanine methyl ester, aspartame, APM), is reported to increase the relative risk of type 2 diabetes and the metabolic syndrome by 67 percent and 36 percent respectively.

Given this data, and the presence of APM in over 6000 food products, there is a need to understand the potential role of APM sweetened products in the development and maintenance of metabolic disease."

Independent Studies Link Aspartame with Depression, Headaches and Other Adverse Effects

A 2004 BMJ study gave aspartame a clean bill of health, in part because it noted 100 percent of industry-funded studies concluded aspartame is safe. Yet, in an editorial response published in BMJ in 2005, it's revealed that 92 percent of independently funded studies found aspartame may cause adverse effects, including depression and headaches.

A recent study also found the administration of aspartame to rats resulted in detectable methanol even after 24 hours, which might be responsible for inducing oxidative stress in the brain.

Aspartame is made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine. But the phenylalanine has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group as that provides the majority of the sweetness. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl ester, is very weak, which allows the methyl group on the phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol. When aspartame is in liquid form, it breaks down into methyl alcohol, or methanol, which is then converted into formaldehyde and represents the root of the problem with aspartame.

Why Aspartame May Be Toxic

Both animals and humans have small structures called peroxisomes in each cell. There are a couple of hundred in every cell of your body, which are designed to detoxify a variety of chemicals.

Peroxisome contains catalase, which helps detoxify methanol once it is turned into formaldehyde. Other chemicals in the peroxisome then convert the formaldehyde to formic acid, which is harmless, but this last step occurs only in non-human animals.

When methanol enters the peroxisome of every animal except humans, it gets into that mechanism. Humans do have the same number of peroxisomes in comparable cells as animals, but human peroxisomes cannot convert the toxic formaldehyde into harmless formic acid. According to Dr. Woody Monte, professor emeritus at Arizona State University in food and chemistry:

"The methanol bounces off the catalase or bounces off something there. What happens then is every cell in your body cannot metabolize methanol. Wherein the animal body, every cell can metabolize and turn it to formic acid, which is safe. What happens to the methyl alcohol?

That's the key. In humans, methyl alcohol could just as easily not be metabolized at all. That would be the ultimate and best outcome, and you could urinate it away or sweat it out and you would be fine.

Unfortunately, there are some locations in the human body, particularly in the lining of the vessels of your body, especially in your brain, that are loaded with alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) that converts methanol to formaldehyde …

… [A]nd there is no catalase present so enormous amounts of damage are created in the tissues."

In Health, 

Dr. Brad Niewierowski 

Aspartame and Shame

January 12, 2016  Mercola.com

This Popular Beverage Can Increase Your Stroke Risk

Is Drinking Diet Soda Worth Increasing Your Stroke Risk?

Diet soda is often perceived as being "healthier" than regular soft drinks because it contains artificial sweeteners in lieu of sugar, and therefore has no calories. Sugar, and particularly the sugar often used to sweeten regular soda, is clearly something you need to limit for optimal health. In fact, before you reach for another can, you might want to get up to speed on the latest research, which shows that drinking diet soda results in an increased risk of vascular events such as stroke, heart attack, and vascular death.

Diet soda can be addictive, so if you need incentive and motivation to quit this habit, ask yourself whether the pleasure you get from drinking it is worth having a stroke. This is a very real scenario, as researchers found that people who drank diet soft drinks daily were 43 percent more likely to have suffered a vascular event, including a stroke. This significant association persisted even after controlling for other factors that could increase the risk, such as smoking, physical activity levels, alcohol consumption, diabetes, heart disease, dietary factors and more.

According to the authors:

"This study suggests that diet soda is not an optimal substitute for sugar-sweetened beverages, and may be associated with a greater risk of stroke, myocardial infarction, or vascular death than regular soda."

Vascular events like strokes and heart attacks typically occur suddenly without any warning, which is why prevention is so important. I like to refer to the most common type of stroke as a brain attack, which is similar to a heart attack; the only difference is that the blood clot blocks blood flow to your brain instead of your heart. As a result, brain cells begin to die. Naturally, the longer your brain goes without oxygen, the greater your risk of lasting brain damage.

In order to be effective, you typically need to get treated within one hour. This is clearly one of the miracles of modern science, however it all goes to waste if you do not address the underlying conditions after the stroke. Again, prevention is your best option, and research is now suggesting that eliminating diet sodas may be an important way to dramatically reduce your stroke risk. Up to 80 percent of strokes are preventable by making lifestyle modifications; this includes not only diet but also optimizing your vitamin D levels, as research recently found that people who got less than the midpoint level of sun exposure were at a 60 percent increased risk for stroke.

Need Even More Incentive to Ditch Diet Soda? It Can Make You Fat!

If potentially lowering your risk of heart attack and stroke doesn't spur you to ditch this dangerous habit, maybe the fact that diet soda will make you fat will. A study by researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, ­­­­presented at the 2011 meeting of the American Diabetes Association, followed 474 diet soda drinkers for nearly 10 years. They found that their waists grew 70 percent larger than the waists of non-diet soda drinkers. Furthermore, those who drank two or more diet sodas a day had a 500 percent greater increase in waist size! A second study by some of the same researchers also revealed that mice eating food laced with the artificial sweetener aspartame had higher blood sugar levels than mice eating food without it, which suggests it may increase your risk of diabetes and metabolic syndrome. In a statement, the researchers noted:

"These results are consistent with data from community-based epidemiologic studies in which the consumption of diet sodas was shown to be associated with increased incidence of metabolic syndrome and diabetes. They suggest that aspartame exposure may in fact directly contribute to increased blood glucose levels, and thus may contribute to the associations observed between diet soda consumption and the risk of diabetes in humans."

Artificial sweeteners also tend to trigger enhanced activity within your brain's pleasure centers, yet at the same time providing less actual satisfaction. This separation of the taste of sweetness from caloric content means that when you consume artificial sweeteners, your brain actually craves more of it because your body is not satisfied at a cellular level by the sugar imposter! This can actually contribute to overeating and weight gain. To best protect your health, ditch the sodas all together and grab some water the next time you need to quench your thirst.

In Health, 

Dr. Brad Niewierowski

Posted By Dr. Mercola | February 20 2012

REFERENCES

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• ⁱ Journal of General Internal Medicine January 27, 2012
• ⁱⁱ Study presented at the meeting of the American Diabetes Association, San Diego, California, June 26, 2011
• ⁱⁱⁱ Study presented at the meeting of the American Diabetes Association, San Diego, California, June 26, 2011
• ^iv Study presented at the meeting of the American Diabetes Association in San Diego, 2005
• ^v Study presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference in New Orleans, February 2012
• ^vi Neurology March 4, 2008 vol. 70 no. 10 788-794