It can make you can weight, get diabetes and wreck your teeth too…
Soft drinks and energy drinks are the single largest source of sugar in the American diet. Together, they account for about 16 teaspoons of added sugar per day (that’s bout 67 grams sugar/day). If you haven’t been to sugarstacks.com, check it out; it can be pretty eye-opening.
Here’s a crazier statistic – the average American drinks over 54.5 gallons of soft drinks per year (that’s almost 600 12-ounce cans). Now, I don’t drink any soda, so somebody out there is drinking close to double this amount…
Once more, soda is super acidic. Take a look a the chart below:
| Substance | pH | Substance | pH |
| Pure water | 7.0 | Diet Mountain Dew | 3.34 |
| Cow’s milk | 6.5 | Mountain Dew | 3.22 |
| Barq’s | 4.61 | Orange Slice | 3.12 |
| Beer | 4.4 | Nestea | 3.04 |
| Diet 7Up | 3.67 | Gatorade | 2.95 |
| Wine | 3.5 | Coke / Pepsi | 2.50 |
| Diet Coke | 3.39 | Battery Acid | 1.0 |
Cola has a pH of 2.5; battery acid has a pH of 1.0. (For those of you that haven’t had chemistry class for a while, pH is scale where anything from 0-7 is acidic, 7-14 is alkaline/basic. The closer a number is to 0 the more acidic it is.)
A study published in the Journal of Dentistry showed that highly acidic drinks, like soda, can cause permanent damage to tooth enamel within the first 30 seconds of consumption. This damage was permanent and was not corrected with tooth brushing and/or flossing.
I have a bottle of cola in my house; it sits under the sink with the other cleansing agents. The low pH of cola makes it a perfect cleaning agent, especially for things like hard water stains, to remove rust, glue, gum or anything else that requires a mild acid to break it down. Anything that can remove rust should not go down your throat.
If you were to do one thing to improve your health, eliminating soda and replacing it with water would be a great choice:)
References:
- National Soft Drink Assc website: www.nsda.org
- American Journal Clinical Nutrition. 1995;62(suppl): 178S-94S.
- C.Mann, S. Ranjitkar, et al. Three-dimensional profilometric assessment of early enamel erosion simulating gastric regurgitation. 2014.06.0111
