Yes!! There are many harmful effects of soft drinks!! More than you expected.Sugary drinks ( also called cold or soft drinks) are beverage which contain high amount of added sugar or other sweeteners (high fructose corn syrup, sucrose) which have many effects to the health. The various drinks include the soda, pop, cola, tonic drinks.

DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH SWEET THEY ARE?

There are about 4.2 grams of pure sugar in a single teaspoon of drink. That was lots of sugar than expected right. Now imagine a glass full of drink contains how many grams of sugar. Aside from sugar, these drinks have enough caffeine to raise your blood pressure, so it is best toskip these beverages.

So what are the harmful effects of soft drinks ?

Obesity

The average can of sugar-sweetened soda contains about 150 calories. if you dint cut the calorie intake from these drinks and not cut back on calories elsewhere, you will gain up to 5 pounds in a year.

An 18-month trial was done which involved 641 primarily normal-weight children randomly assigned to receive either a sugar-free, or a artificially sweetened beverage or a similar sugar-containing beverage found that the replacement of these sugar-containing beverages with noncaloric beverages reduced their weight gain and the fat accumulation in the normal-weight children.

Another 20-year study on 120,000 men and women found that who increased their sugary drink consumption by one 12-ounce serving per day gained more weight over time — on average, an extra pound every 4 years — than people who did not change their intake.obesity has been one of the worst out comes of the harmful effects of soft drinks, leading to various diseases.

Diabetes

People who consumed these sugary drinks regularly — 1 to 2 cans a day or more — have a 26% greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes than people who rarely have such drinks

The Nurses’ Health Study has shown the connection by following the health of more than 90,000 women for eight years.

The nurses who said they had one or more servings a day of a sugar-sweetened soft drink has shown to develop the diabetes in following years.

Black Women’s Health Study, an ongoing long-term study of nearly 60,000 African-American women from all parts of the United States showed Interestingly, the increased risk with soft drinks was tightly linked to increased weight.

Heart disease

Heart Disease Heart Attack Heart Health Stroke

A study has shown that the 40,000 men for two decades found that those who averaged one can of a sugary beverage per day had a 20% higher risk of having a heart attack or dying from a heart attack than men who rarely consumed sugary drinks.

The Nurses’ Health Study, which tracked the health records of nearly 90,000 women over two decades, found that women who drank more than two servings of sugary beverage each day had shown about a 40 percent higher risk of heart attacks or death from heart disease than women who rarely drank sugary beverages.

Gout

the harmful effects of soft drinks

A research study of 22-year-long study of 80,000 women found that those who consumed a can a day of sugary drink had a 75% higher risk of gout than women who rarely had such drinks. Researchers found a similarly-elevated risk in men.

Bone Health

Soda contains high levels of phosphate which can be a harm to the bone health.Consuming more phosphate than calcium can have a deleterious effect on bone health.Milk is a good source of calcium and protein. There is an inverse pattern between soft drink consumption and milk consumption — when one goes up, the other goes down.

Mortality

The harmful effects of soft drinks beverages people drink, the greater their risk of premature death — particularly from cardiovascular disease, and to a lesser extent from cancer.

The researchers found that the more sugary beverages you drink, the more the risk of early death from any cause increased.

Compared with drinking sugary beverages less than once per month, drinking one to four per month was linked with a 1% increased risk; two to six per week with a 6% increase; one to two per day with a 14% increase; and two or more per day with a 21% increase.

Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

The 2,634 individuals in the study completed a CT scan to measure the amount of fat in the liver.

They saw a higher prevalence of NAFLD among people who reported drinking more than one sugar-sweetened drink per day compared to people who said they drank no sugar-sweetened beverages.

kidney Disease

the harmful effects of soft drinks

In an 11-year-long Harvard Medical School study, including 3,318 women, researchers found that diet cola is linked with a two-fold increased risk for kidney decline

As the Soda cans are coated with the endocrine disruptor bisphenol A (BPA), which has been linked to everything from heart disease to obesity to reproductive problems.

Caffeine which is contained in the sodas are a diuretic. Diuretics promote the production of urine, causing you to urinate more frequently.

When the body’s cells are dehydrated they have difficulty absorbing nutrients, and it also makes it more difficult for the body to eliminate waste

Cancers

The artificial brown coloring in colas is a chemical process, it is not made from caramelized sugar. It is made by reacting sugars with ammonia and sulfides under high pressure and temperatures.

These chemical reactions result in the formation of 2-methylimidazole (2-MI) and 4 methylimidazole (4-MI), which in government-conducted studies caused lung, liver, or thyroid cancer or leukemia in laboratory mice and rats.

Asthma

the harmful effects of soft drinks

They go by the names sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate, and they’re used in nearly all diet sodas.

“These chemicals have the ability to cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria to the point that they totally inactivate it — they knock it out altogether,” Peter Piper, a professor of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., told a British newspaper.

The preservative has also been linked to hives, asthma, and other allergic conditions, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

A study done in South Australis of 16,907 participants aged 16 years and older, showed high

levels of soda consumption were positively associated with asthma and COPD.

CONCLUSION:

The soft drinks are most commonly used beverages all around the world but there are many Harmful effects of soft drinks like that of obesity , diabetes, heart disease, cancer etc.

It is better to avoid these drinks to promote good health and being. As many researches have proved that more than short term harmful effects , long term harmful effects of these drinks over health have proved to be deadly.