For those of you interested, here is another article from Dr. Al Sears that explains why sugary drinks(especially diet sodas) are so dangerous. The thing I love about this doctor is that he is always up to date on all the newest research.
"It doesn’t matter how healthy or thin you are, reaching for a sugary drink is still dangerous for your heart. Four times as dangerous as not drinking one.
New research presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association finds that women who drank only two sugary drinks a day were nearly four times as likely to have high triglycerides, the best predictor of heart risk for women.
They were also significantly more likely to have impaired blood sugar levels even when not eating or drinking.
Sugary drinks increase triglycerides because they are almost pure carbohydrate. Drinking flavored water, sweetened tea, soda, or those dessert-like coffees send a rush of sugar straight into your bloodstream.
When your body gets too much of this kind of carbohydrate, it wants to store it as fat. How does it do this? It turns the carbs into triglycerides. Then it transports them through the blood from the liver where they’re made to the adipose cells where they’re stored.
Problem is, even if you’re outwardly thin, this fat can accumulate around your organs without you ever knowing it. It’s called visceral fat. It causes inflammation, and can lead to the inflammatory diseases diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.
And sugary drinks are bad for that reason, but diet drinks may actually be worse.
Researchers were shocked when looking at results from the San Antonio Longitudinal Study of Aging. They followed 474 people for nearly 10 years. They compared the change in waist size for diet soda users versus non-users (both sugary drink drinkers and non-drinkers).
People who drank diet sodas had a 70 percent greater increase in waist size. And for those who said they drank two or more diet sodas a day, their bellies grew by 500 percent more.
That’s five times bigger waists for people drinking diet sodas.
On average, for each diet soft drink you have each day, you’re 65 percent more likely to become overweight during the next seven to eight years, and 41 percent more likely to become obese.
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