What One Can of Coke Does to Your Body

What happens after a can of Coke? One sugary drink a day can move real health needles. A 10 year United Kingdom study of more than 123,000 people tied a single daily Coke type beverage to a 50% higher risk of fatty liver disease. This is after only one Coke a day. I Another major analysis linked sugary drinks to millions of new cases of diabetes and heart disease. What's in the can? About 140 calories, 8 teaspoons of added sugar, around 35 grams, plus roughly 33 milligrams of caffeine, phosphoric acid and caramel color. The timeline is simple. Sugar hits in 10 minutes, blood sugar spikes around 20. Caffeine absorption peaks by 40, 45 minutes and a crash lands about an hour. In pediatric specialists advise zero caffeine for kids under 11. Let me say that again. Doctors who specialize in kids say no kid under 11 should have any caffeine drinks. Teens should stay under about 100 milligrams a day. If you drink it, pair it with meals or reach for low sugar alternatives. Okay, what's the real message here? Just one coke a day increases your chances of getting fatty liver disease by 50%. That's crazy. You don't have to have a special diet, fancy chef, gourmet meals. If you want to be healthier, just drink more water and cut out the sugary garbage. Okay. And those of you listening on the podcast, I am literally drinking water. I'm not perfect folks, but something I have really become fanatical evangelist for in the last decade is drinking water. Making that your default drink because it is so easy to eat relatively healthy food and destroy your diet with sugary beverages. I'll teach you. I don't drink those Coca colas. I drink orange juice and apple juice. Sorry, there's so much sugar and quite often added sugar and it's processed in a sort by grinding it up. Fruit juice Again, don't take my advice. I'm not a medical doctor or a registered diet. Look at what most dietitians say today, which is skip the fruit juice. You just don't need it. It's so much added sugar you're better off drinking water. Doesn't have to be fancy water. This is tap water. I do have my all of my water in my home is run through a filter so I can just go to the faucet and fill up anytime I want and and I drink it all day long. There are no side effects from drinking water unless you're just, you know, trying to drink three gallons at Once you can cause problems, but that's extraordinarily rare. Far more common is the problem of dehydration, or the problem, as this study in the United Kingdom pointed out, of giving yourself fatty liver disease. That sounds disgusting. And you know, people think of it. Oh, that's for someone who eats eight hamburgers a day. Well, no. One Coke a day. 50% higher chance of getting fatty liver disease. Let's look at some more of the facts. Again, basic can of Coke, 140 calories, 35 grams of or 33 milligrams of caffeine. There's also enamel erosion on your teeth from the acid. More damage to your liver. The extra fructose creates fat over time. If you're going to drink a Coke, and I'm not recommending you do, far better to do it with a meal rather than just by itself. Okay, confession time. When I was a kid, we had Coke in the house. I drank a lot of it. Yeah, kids like Coke, adults like Coke because it's sweet. We are biologically conditioned from an evolutionary standpoint to crave sweetness. And it's got a lot of sweets in it. I have tried assiduously to keep not just Coke but all sugary drinks out of my household because I don't want it for myself, my daughter, for my wife. And yeah, do we occasionally splurge some somewhere, a movie, but not that often. Yes, but I try to make it an extraordinarily rare treat. I did mess up recently. We have a new Slurpee machine that makes a Slurpee just like you would find a Slushie, just like you would find at any convenience store. I thought, wow, here's a chance to have a treat for my family, my daughter, her friends, and it's totally healthy. We just put fruit juice in and we do that most of the time. And it's great. Again, I'm contradicting myself, but I just said, know, don't drink fruit juice. But if it's a special occasion, a movie. Yeah, better to have a fruit Slurpee than a Coke. Nothing else. It doesn't have the acid and the chemicals in it. But my daughter heard me say over time that I remember as a kid, my mom would take me to the local 711 and I would get my favorite Coke Slurpee. And she reminded me of that of enough times. I said, okay, just for Halloween, we'll get Coke was at a Costco. And if you've ever been to a Costco, you can't just buy one can of Coke. You can't just buy one bottle of Coke. I ended up getting an entire gigantic. I don't know if this must be 32 cans of Coke. It was the smallest unit I could get. And sure enough, next thing you know, it wasn't just that day. My daughter had gotten one the next day for lunch. That's on me. That's my fault. Now, I then did the responsible thing. I went and hid them. And I'm not going to tell you where I hid them. I'm not telling my daughter. I do recommend the easiest way to avoid soft drinks is to not buy them and not have them in your house to just tell yourself, drink water. If you don't like the taste of water, add a lemon or a lime or a piece of fruit to it. If the water out of your tap doesn't taste good or has a chlorine taste to it, put a filter on it. Get a bread of some sort of inexpensive filter. You can do it. But get in the habit of drinking water because it's, it's one of those habits. There's numerous, numerous upsides, and there's virtually zero downside. You save a lot of money. For starters, you're not buying the cappuccino mocha with lots of sugar. You're not getting the chai with a gallon of sugar in it. You're not getting the coke with all the sugar. You're helping your body a lot by reducing sugar intake. You're not spending all the money. You don't need to buy bottled water. Tap water is going to be fine in most situations. And it's so much better for your, for all of your organs, for your health, for your skin. I mean, there's just so many benefits to sugar, to water. And there I am, the Freudian slip. We just, we're programmed to want sugar. No, we want more water if we want to be healthy. So I want to raise a toast to you with my glass of water and urge you not just today, not just tomorrow, but please make water. And I don't mean branded water. And it doesn't have to be in a fancy bottle and it doesn't have to be sparkling mineral water. It can just be any clean, safe tap water. Make that your water of choice, your drink of choice. And you're going to be better off. Your kids are going to be better off, your family will be better.