The Watershed Wellness Newsletter
Volume 1, Issue 6 April 26, 2006
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Top Ten Reasons Never To Consume Soft Drinks!

By: Bob McCauley

1. Soft drinks steal water from the body. They work very much like a diuretic which takes away more water than it provides to the body. Just to process the high levels of sugar in soft drinks steals a considerable amount of water from the body. To replace the water stolen by soft drinks, you need to drink 8-12 glasses of water for every one glass of soft drinks that you consume!

2. Soft Drinks never quench your thirst, certainly not your body's need for water. Constantly denying your body an adequate amount can lead to Chronic Cellular Dehydration, a condition that weakens your body at the cellular level. This, in turn, can lead to a weakened immune system and a plethora of diseases.

3. The elevated levels of phosphates in soft drinks leach vital minerals from your body. Soft Drinks are made with purified water that also leach vital minerals from your body. A severe lack of minerals can lead to Heart Disease (lack of magnesium), Osteoporosis (lack of calcium) and many other diseases. Most vitamins can not perform their function in the body without the presence of minerals.

4. Soft Drinks can remove rust from a car bumper or other metal surfaces. Imagine what it's doing to your digestive tract as well as the rest of your body.

5. The high amounts of sugar in Soft Drinks causes your pancreas to produce an abundance of insulin, which leads to a "sugar crash". Chronic elevation and depletion of sugar and insulin can lead to diabetes and other imbalance related diseases. This is particularly disruptive to growing children which can lead to life-long health problems.

6. Soft Drinks severely interfere with digestion. Caffeine and high amounts of sugar virtually shut down the digestive process. That means your body is essentially taking in NO nutrients from the food you may have just eaten, even that eaten hours earlier. Consumed with french-fries which can take WEEKS to digest, there is arguably nothing worse a person can put in their body.

7. Diet soft drinks contain Aspartame, which has been linked to depression, insomnia, neurological disease and a plethora of other illness. The FDA has received more than 10,000 consumer complaints about Aspartame, that's 80% of all complaints about food additives.

8. Soft Drinks are EXTREMELY acidic, so much so that they can eat through the liner of an aluminum can and leach aluminum from the can if it sits on the shelf too long. Alzheimer patients who have been autopsied ALL have high levels of aluminum in their brains. Heavy metals in the body can lead to many neurological and other diseases.

9. Soft Drinks are EXTREMELY acidic: The human body naturally exists at a pH of about 7.0. Soft Drinks have a pH of about 2.5, which means you are putting something into your body that is hundred of thousands of times more acidic that your body is! Diseases flourish in an acidic environment. Soft Drinks and other acidic food deposit acid waste in the body which accumulates over time in the joints and around the organs. For example, the Body pH of cancer or arthritis patients are always low. The sicker the person, the lower the Body pH.

10. Soft Drinks are the WORST THING you can possibly put in your body. Don't even think of taking a sip of a Soft Drink when you are sick with a cold, flu or something worse. It will only make it that much harder for your body to fight the illness.

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Benzene in soft drinks warrants FDA warning

Suzanne Havala Hobbs , Correspondent

Benzene is in some soft drinks and other beverages sold in the United States , many of them consumed regularly by children.

That simple statement alone should be enough to prompt swift and serious action by the federal government.

It hasn't.

Drinks containing as much as 27 times the federal limit for benzene in drinking water have been found on supermarket shelves, according to the most recent government data publicly available -- from the Food and Drug Administration's Total Diet Study, which examined contaminant levels in beverages sold between 1995 and 2001.

How can that be?

As I wrote last month, the FDA learned nearly 15 years ago that two ingredients -- ascorbic acid and sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate -- can interact in products and form benzene, a carcinogen. Certain conditions -- heat and light -- can accelerate benzene production in drinks.

In the early 1990s, after first learning of this problem, FDA entrusted industry to take voluntary steps to reduce the benzene content of beverages. No public announcement was made.

I spoke last week with Mike Redman, vice president for scientific, technical and regulatory affairs for the American Beverage Association. Redman also worked as a soft drink industry representative in the early 1990s and discussed the issue of benzene contamination with FDA officials then.

Redman said that back then FDA did not dictate specific steps for reducing benzene in drinks.

"The agreement was, because FDA is not product formulators, either, and they'll be the first to tell you that, that they left that up to the industry to determine the best ways for the individual products to lower those benzene levels," Redman said.

Whatever the agreement was between FDA and the soft drink industry, the problem hasn't been fixed.

Recent independent laboratory tests have found benzene in soft drinks at levels higher than 5 parts per billion, the maximum level allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency in drinking water.

As a result, FDA has begun testing soft drinks again for benzene. However, the agency isn't releasing the data to the public.

"To release all the data now could be confusing," Laura Tarantino, the FDA's director of food additive safety, told the Associated Press. "It's not only not good for companies; it's not particularly good for consumers. It doesn't give them any useful information. One of the misperceptions is that anytime you see ascorbic acid and benzoate, you're going to automatically have high levels of benzene, and that just isn't so."

It may certainly be true that not all drinks containing the combination of ascorbic acid and benzoates also contain benzene. But we do know now that some of them do -- and at levels that would require sharp warnings if it were in your drinking water.

(A list of beverages containing ascorbic acid and sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate is available online at www.ewg.org/issues/toxics/20060228/list.php

In our modern, industrialized world it may be impossible to avoid all exposures to contaminants such as benzene. The biggest benzene exposures for most people come when filling up a gas tank or driving in heavy traffic.

But that doesn't excuse the presence of a toxic, cancer-causing substance in a manufactured product that's entirely optional in our diets.

Without attention to this problem from the media and our elected representatives, FDA and the soft drink industry are likely to reach another ineffective and soon-to-be-neglected gentlemen's agreements.

In which case, consider this column your warning label.