Still Drinking Soda? You Might Want to Rethink That…

I’m not exactly a soda guzzler, but I do have one of those oh-so-convenient fridge packs of ginger ale and a couple of cans of Pepsi in my fridge right now, and gosh darn it, I will be drinking them. But in my defense, my actual level of soda consumption is about 1-2 a week at the most. And according to Dr. Madelyn Fernstrom, who writes Health Journal for iVillage, that’s probably a good thing:

One big way to save calories, and help avoid overweight to begin with, is to substitute that 150 calorie 12 ounce can for a sugar-free diet soda with practically no calories. Just making that substitution once a day will produce a 10 pound weight loss in a year.

This article [read the whole post to get the context here] compared soda drinking – and did not differentiate between diet soda and regular soda, and lumped them together. When making their comparisons for risk factors, they found that “soda drinking” was associated with more of these risk factors.

We’ve talked before about the link between diet soda and metabolic disease, and you already know about how easy it is to drink lots of extra calories without even realizing it because of all of the sugar in even healthy things like fruit juice. Your best bet is to stick with water whenever you can, and to cut juices (you are drinking 100% fruit juice rather than fruit juice cocktail, right?) with water to reduce calories.

Addendum: That’s Fit just posted Top 5 Alternatives to Soda. (I love #1, here’s my recipe for #4, and check #5 here)

Contents © Copyright 2007 Kristen King