The Not So Cool Truth About Soda (Viral Video!)

By James Colquhoun

This week I wanted to share with you a great animation short-film that tells the story of how sugar has affected the lives of a polar bear family struggling to deal with their addiction. It's a video that is going viral and after watching it, you'll understand why!

It's time we shed more light on sugar; how truly bad it is for our bodies and why we should reduce our consumption. When I'm talking about sugar, I'm referring in particular to high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) that is found in many processed foods and soda drinks.

Let's focus on soda, or as I like to refer to it as "disease in a can". The average American consumes more than 60 gallons of soft drink each year. If you consider the fact that there is more than 10 teaspoons of sugar in a can of soda, that's a heck of a lot of sugar that we're consuming in just one year. In fact, as a nation, the average US adult consumes 22 teaspoons of sugar in a day, and an average US teen consumes a whopping 34 teaspoons of sugar.

In other words 100% of your daily intake of sugar is sitting in one can of soda, and you can bet that most people who are drinking soda are either drinking more than one can per day, or are also consuming other sugar ladened foods that are overflowing our required sugar levels per day. That's where obesity steps in.

There is not one ounce of nutritional content in a can of soda to help your body get its daily intake of nutrients, in fact it's totally the opposite. Soda is a cocktail of chemicals and carbonated tap water that destroys your body's ecosystem. As the profound words of Mike Adams states in the Hungry For Change film:

"In termS of Glycemic Index, high fructose corn syrup is like jet fuel for your body. If you put jet fuel into your car you're going to ruin your engine and burn it out. Much of the same thing will happen in the human body."

A lot of people are under the misconception that they are avoiding the bad effects of soda by drinking the "diet" variety, however they may be doing more harm than good. "Diet" soda contains aspartame which is linked with a long list of side-effects that can be more detrimental to your health than the original sugar filled variation.

So why do we keep consuming it?

The hard fact is that sugar is addictive! Research has suggested that sugar activates the same reward pathways in the brain as traditional drugs of abuse such as morphine and heroin. It's not claiming that it is quite as potent as those hard drugs, but it does stimulate the parts of the brain that give you that "high" and make you crave more of it. It also doesn't help that the large soda corporations are able to fill us with a desire to consume their beverages thanks to their deceiving marketing campaigns.

Soda's Really Not Cool

Everyone should be able to remember the Coca-Cola advertisements of the "cool" bear sharing a refreshing bottle of soda with his family, promising to bring them happiness and fulfillment to their lives. Naturally, this is something that everyone wishes to have in their life, and makes people open that next can of soda hoping that the answer is at the bottom of that soda can. They're going to be drinking an awful lot of soda, because the answer is never going to be found there.

The marketing of Coca-Cola also tells us to "live on the coke side of life". That side of life welcomes us with tooth decay, obesity, heart disease and diabetes, does that really sound like "life" to you?

It's not all bad news.

Don't forget that not all sugar is bad for us. Mother nature provides us with enough of the "good" sugars found in fruits and vegetables that help nourish and boost our body without all the nasty side-effects of the highly processed sweet junk. If you have a sweet tooth and can't curb the cravings, then swap that "disease in a can" for a handful of strawberries or any other piece of naturally sweetened food that your body will be thanking you for and giving you internal hugs.

We hope you enjoyed the film and would love for you to share this video with anyone that you think would benefit from watching it and help us spread the message of natural health and wellbeing.