• Welcome to Autism Forums, a friendly forum to discuss Aspergers Syndrome, Autism, High Functioning Autism and related conditions.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Private Member only forums for more serious discussions that you may wish to not have guests or search engines access to.
    • Your very own blog. Write about anything you like on your own individual blog.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon! Please also check us out @ https://www.twitter.com/aspiescentral

This is what happens when you stop drinking fizzy drinks

AGXStarseed

Well-Known Member
(Not written by me)


1. You stop having sugar cravings
“Sugar cravings get drastically reduced after our clients have quit drinking soda,” Moss says. “And if you’re a diet soda drinker, not only do sugar cravings get reduced when you quit, but often people find themselves naturally gravitating towards smaller portions,” she adds.

Diet fizzy drinks can lead to over-consumption of other foods and it’s not better for you at all. “It tastes sweet, so our body prepares for the sugar it’s anticipating by beginning to spike blood sugar levels,” Moss says. “However, when ‘real’ sugar isn’t delivered, the body is still left craving the sugar it was originally promised. And that creates addictive cycles.” The result is eating more and weight gain, according to studies.


2. It becomes easier to lose weight
“Sugar consumption leads to weight gain (and cravings for more sugar),” Moss says. Artificial sweeteners are also linked to sugar cravings and over-consumption of food in general. “When you replace sodas with water, you’re eliminating a lot of sugar and cravings. Your body naturally begins to lose weight and your wellbeing dramatically increases as well,” she adds.


3. You strengthen your immune system
“Refined sugar (and artificial sweeteners) is inflammatory by nature,” Moss says. “Refined cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial sweeteners are highly processed and refined…The refined sweeteners have been stripped of all nutrients, fiber, and minerals. Your body gets more depleted trying to break them down and digest them, which leaves you depleted, inflamed, and at risk for chronic health issues,” she adds. So when you often eat inflammatory food, your chances of coming down with an illness will increase.


4. You will look younger
Why spend thousands of pounds a year to artificially look young when you can achieve the same effect in a perfectly natural way? Start by banning carbonated cans from your diet. As the body cells divide and we get older, the telomeres that protect the genes shorten. Studies have found that fizzy drinks were associated with telomere shortness, increasing cell ageing just as much as smoking.


5. You are not as hungry
“We see this all the time in our practice when clients quit soda,” Moss says. “When you replace soda with water, which is hydrating, and naturally reduces hunger, and get off of the sugar rollercoaster, and associated cravings, that sugar can create, hunger levels tend to naturally balance out,” she adds.

When people eat and drink something very sweet on regular basis, the body adapts and expects to consume more calories. It’s hungry when it doesn’t get its “fix.” Stomach muscles relax and the brain releases hormones telling us we’re hungry. That doesn’t happen when you reduce your sugar intake.


6. Your bones will be less prone to breaking
“Sugar robs our bones of nutrients and key minerals, like calcium, that are essential for strong, healthy, flexible bones,” Moss says. “Additionally, the phosphoric acid in most sodas also leaches calcium and other nutrients from our bones. The sugar and phosphoric acid combo means an increased risk of osteoporosis – especially as we age.”


7. Your teeth will be stronger
Fizzy drinks pretty much destroy your teeth by eating at the enamel, which is actually considered the hardest substance in the human body. The citric acid in soda wears enamel away, making the teeth softer and more vulnerable to cavities and yellowing. Consuming too many soft drinks can even result in a mouth as corroded as that of a meth abuser, as a 2013 study shows.


8. You’ll be more energetic
“Caffeine in soda isn’t worse than the caffeine in tea or coffee but it’s the sugar (or artificial sweeteners) combined with the caffeine that leads to a double whammy when it comes to sodas and their negative effect on our health,” Moss says. “Caffeine gives us a boost, but it’s temporary. It isn’t a ‘real’ source of energy like, say, getting a boost of energy from the nutrients in fruits or vegetables. Over time, over-consumption of caffeine leaves us fatigued as it can wreak havoc on our adrenal system,” she adds.

Too much caffeine leaves you dehydrated, which will also result in feeling tired because your nervous system is working overtime, triggering the release of stress hormones in your body, and causing increased heart rate and blood pressure spikes.


9. No more hidden fats to worry about
You may think that because fizzy drinks are not greasy, they're not fattening. However, dangerous fats in soft drinks that the eye simply cannot detect are there. You won’t see the changes in your waistline for a few weeks but they will come, as a 2012 study shows. People were divided into groups, drinking water, soda and milk for half a year. Total fat mass was the same but those drinking soda had a significant increase in harmful hidden fats, like liver and skeletal fat.


10. You won’t have take as many trips to the bathroom
“Caffeine creates a diuretic effect on the body, and can leave you dehydrated,” Moss says. This is true whether you’re drinking tea, coffee, or fizzy drinks. However, soda – whether it’s caffeinated or not – has the added ‘bonus’ of sugar or artificial sweeteners. While these aren’t diuretics per se, they certainly don’t contribute to your hydration,” she adds. Soft drinks can irritate the bladder, making symptoms of Urinary Tract Infection worse.


11. You reduce your risk of kidney disease (and kidney stones)
“It’s the oxidative stress and chronic inflammation that regular soda consumption causes that can lead to a whole host of health issues, including kidney failure,” Moss says. “The inflammatory nature of soda is linked to the refined sugar (or chemical artificial sweeteners), phosphoric acid, and caffeine. But mostly it’s that sugar and artificial sweeteners that’s doing the bulk of the health damage.”

Research shows that a lot of soda increases the risk of kidney disease. Women who drank a lot of diet soda every day had decreased liver function compared to women who didn’t drink soda.


12. You’ll likely live longer
Want to know the secrets of longevity? Ditching soda is one of them. People who drank soft drinks have shorter telomeres in their immune cells, which means their risk of premature death was higher because the cells were not protected, according to a study.

“I believe that the body truly always wants to heal and be healthy, and when we provide the right ‘ingredients,’ healing begins to occur,” Moss says. “If you set out on a path to drastically reduce sugar from your diet, cut out artificial/processed foods, consume lots of water, make sure your nutrient/mineral needs are being met, and fill your diet with lots of healthy fruits and veggies, healing can and does occur on a really massive level. We see this with our clients all the time, and it’s so possible,” she adds.


13. You protect your brain
“Caffeine’s a temporary boost that can lead to long-term health issues when over-consumed,” Moss says. “If you crave caffeine, better to get it in the form of green tea, black tea, or a cup of coffee than a sugary soda that comes with its whole host of other ingredients that can harm your health.”

Studies have shown that over-consumption of soda can result in impaired learning processes and memory. “We show that animals that learn a spatial memory task faster have more brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) mRNA and protein in the hippocampus (the part of the brain responsible for memory and emotion). Two months on the [saturated fat and refined sugar] diet were sufficient to reduce hippocampal level of BDNF and spatial learning performance,” the study says.

Drinking too many sugary drinks may increase a person's risk for developing Alzheimer's disease later in life.


14. Your blood pressure goes back to normal
A Harvard study found that sweetened drinks increase the risk of chronic heart disease by 20 percent. Other research has shown that the more soda drink you consume, the higher your blood pressure rises. So cut back on the carbonated drinks to lower your blood pressure and reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome – several simultaneous chronic conditions like high blood pressure, blood sugar level, cholesterol, and too much body fat around the waist – that increase the risk of heart failure.


15. You eat less (especially sweets)
The simple sugar fructose in sodas does not lower the level of ghrelin, the hunger hormone, in your blood in the same way glucose, the main carb found in starchy foods, does. That’s why artificial sweeteners affect the sense of feeling full after eating. You feel hungry because the body is used to consuming a lot of calories because what we consume is so sweet. And sweeteners can be 400 times sweeter than regular sugar.


16. Your belly stays flat
People mostly gain weight around the waistline after consuming too much soda, according to a study. University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio observed 474 participants over an average of about a decade. People who drank diet soda had a 70 percent greater increase in their waistlines than those who didn’t drink diet soda. Also, people who drank two or more diet sodas per day saw increases 500 percent greater.


SOURCE: http://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/med...izzy-drinks/ss-BBwn2T2?li=BBoPWjQ&ocid=AARDHP

ADDITIONAL: https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/04/cleveland_clinic_study_finds_t.html
 
Last edited:
I would like to add to the article. About four years ago my lady-friend suffered a subarachnoid hemorrhage that triggered three strokes and two subsequent heart attacks. I did some research and found that there was a link between the consumption of diet drinks and brain hemorrhages, especially in women. She was drinking about a case of Diet Coke a day. To this day I believe that the stuff contributed greatly to her health catastrophe.

Here's a link to an interesting article put out by the Cleveland Clinic:

https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/04/cleveland_clinic_study_finds_t.html


Thanks for the heads up. I've added that to this article as an additional resource.
 
These are all very good points.

However, I must point out: caffiene addiction.

For some drinks of this type, this affects it too, not just in terms of the adrenal system as mentioned above. I speak from experience that it not only makes it hard to stop, it makes one not WANT to stop. Not that I've exactly tried, mind you.

It certainly complicates things.

And the irony of me saying all of this about 20 minutes before I run to the gas station to grab said drink does occur to me.
 
I used to be addicted to diet coke in my twenties but quit - that was hard, but so glad I did. It was the only thing I drank back then; now I mainly drink water. I don't care much for fizzy and/or sugary drinks now - I only occasionally will have a soda.

More recently, I tried to reduce my sugar intake by using artificial sweeteners in my coffee. After a few years of going through several packets of splenda and other type of sweeteners a day (it would be around 20 to 30 packets a day - two or three per coffee, coffee every hour on the hour), I quit that too. Pretty much because I was getting numbness in my hands, and after reading up it, learned that artificial sweeteners are linked to permanent nerve damage.

I just decided to learn to like my coffee without sugar - and I'm happy to say that my sugar cravings have been drastically reduced, my coffee cravings have been drastically reduced (I drink about half what I used to, still a lot, but better than it was), and the good news is that the numbness in my hands is gone.

Still waiting for that flat belly though . . .
 
I am addicted to 'normal' coke, I have managed to stop for a few months before now but always go back to it when under stress. My skin is definitely better when I stop but I see none of the other benefits mentioned above. I don't lose any more weight and don't look any younger as I already look at least ten years younger than I am, have no blood pressure problems etc. So I feel less motivated to stop permanently [emoji53]
 

New Threads

Top Bottom