Stay away from this evil liquid. You’d think the worst thing in soft drink is sugar but it’s actually a lot worse than that. In my opinion soft drink is one the worst ‘foods’ you can put into your body, here’s why.
1. Sugar
We all know that refined sugar is not good for you and should be avoided as much as possible. Soft drink in particular is full of the stuff. I mean, literally full of it. One can of soft drink contains approximately twelve teaspoons of sugar! And we give this stuff to children, that’s a scary thought.
Do not drink diet soft drinks!
So you’re thinking you’re okay because you drink diet soft drinks or Pepsi Max because ‘don’t worry, there’s no sugar’. Actually, the healthier option is to drink the regular soft drink with the twelve teaspoons of sugar. Diet soft drinks contain an artificial sweetener that is extremely harmful to the body. It is one of only a few chemicals that can penetrate through the blood brain barrier. It can have enormous harmful side effects and lead to a lot of illness and disease. View my article, DO NOT eat these foods for more information.
2. Phosphoric acid
This is something soft drink consumers are generally completely oblivious to. Soft drinks contain phosphoric acid which is added to help prevent those bubbles that you love so much from going flat. The problem with phosphoric acid is, well obviously it’s highly acidic. This makes the soft drink an exceptionally acidic ‘food’ to consume. A human body is naturally alkaline (sitting somewhere between 7.35 and 7.45) so this highly acidic substance entering our bodies is a real shock to the system. The body reacts by triggering an emergency alkaline flush to balance out this acidity. The best source of this alkaline in the body is from calcium, which is where the double whammy comes in. So, not only is the sugar in soft drink rotting your teeth, the phosphoric acid is pulling the calcium out of your blood, bones and teeth. That’s horrific!
Really this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise if you think about it. Everybody knows that coca cola can clean coins, and is a fantastic way to dissolve corrosion on a car battery. Eww. Well, my insides certainly aren’t made of metal or steel so I sure won’t be drinking stuff that can clean hard metals.
There’s a lot of information on the Internet about phosphoric acid in soft drink so if you’re curious do a Google search and take a look. I encourage you to explore the information out there because there’s a lot of it, way too much for me to post in here.
A great alternative for healthy little children
Really though, when it comes down to it - don’t drink the stuff and especially don’t give it to your children. It’s not just the phosphoric acid either, soft drink contains caffeine which is really bad thing to give to children. Honestly, they won’t even miss it. We never had soft drink in the house when we were kids and I never even cared.
If your kids start nagging you then there’s a great alternative you can try, and it’s something I like to drink in summer too. Soda water is great, you can add heaps of stuff to it to make it taste even better than soft drinks. Better still, it doesn’t contain phosphoric acid. Try adding juice, you can add as much or as little as you like. My favourite is about a half/half mix of soda water and organic orange juice.
Alternatively freeze some ice cubes of fruit. Passionfruit is a really good option. Pop a couple of passionfruit cubes into a glass of soda water and yum, it tastes heaps better than soft drink and it’s good for you!
Stay off the soft drink and give your body a break 
Frances Kerr
Fran Kerr is the founding editor of High on Health. To cure your acne, sign up to Fran's FREE acne cure mini-course or download her latest how to guide, Eat Away Your Acne.
4 responses ↓
Hey Fran - a nice start to the whole acid/alkaline thing. From memory the CO2 in soft drinks acts to acidify them even further. Do you observe an alkaline diet or are you just trying to avoid the main culprits? I’ve been trying recently but it’s pretty hard to be strictly observant — lots of tasty foods are acidic
Yeah, trying to eat more alkaline than acid foods is really hard. To be honest, I find it difficult to get filled up on just fruit and veges alone. I want to try a little harder though, especially since summer is coming - it’s a great time for salads. I think a lot of tasty foods are alkaline too
do diet softdrink and fake sugars really cause cancer, brain disorders, wind etc?? ive heard this before but if they are that bad why dont thewy have excess consumption warnings on them?
Hi bec, refined white sugar is really bad for you but it’s not like everybody that consumes it is going to get sick. If you consume a lot of it or regularly, it just means it puts a strain on your body and can be a contributing factor to getting sick.
I actually think there should be an excess consumption warning on it. Look how long it took them to put warnings on cigarette packets! And that is more of a direct risk. There are a ton of really bad foods that don’t have warnings, like food colorings and aspartame just to name a couple.
When you start reading up about what’s in our foods it can be quite surprising what we actually eat in processed and prepackaged foods.
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