If This Doesn t Put You Off Your Daily Soda, Nothing Will.

AUTHOR: KERRY-ANNE OCTOBER 22, 2014 11:35 AM

Do you indulge in a daily soda? Well, you might want to read this before you rea
ch for your next can.
You re probably be sick to the back teeth of hearing that a typical 20-ounce can o
f pop contains up to 18 spoonfuls of sugar and more than 240 calories.
But here s something you didn t know.
Drinking soda regularly might also destroy your DNA.
As Salon reports:
According to new research published in the American Journal of Public Health, pe
ople who drink more soda have shorter telomeres (bits of DNA that protect the en
ds of chromosomes in cells) in white blood cells. The affected telomeres have be
en associated with age-associated diseases including cancer, diabetes and heart
disease.
The researchers calculated that drinking one 20-ounce soda every day was associa
ted with 4.6 years of additional biological aging, similar to the effects of smo
king, or the inverse effect of exercising, which reduces the effects of age.
In short, drinking your can of soda a day could have a similar impact on your he
alth as smoking.
Regular consumption of sugar-sweetened sodas might influence disease development,
not only by straining the body s metabolic control of sugars, but also through ac
celerated cellular aging of tissues, said Elissa Epel, professor of psychiatry at
the University of California in San Francisco and senior author of the study.
The finding was consistent regardless of age, race, income or education level.
Epel and her team s analysis of data from 5,309 adults in the National Health and
Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) came just as soda companies forked over mi
llions of dollars to defeat local soda-tax ballot measures which would see a 1-c
ent-an-ounce levy on sugary drinks.
Soda companies paid $7.7m on their campaign to defeat San Francisco s Soda Tax; wh
ile in Berkeley, where proponents of the tax had raised $135,000 as of last week
, the beverage industry fought back with $1.4 million
that amounts to nearly $12
per resident spent to defeat the ballot measure.
This explains why the industry has successfully blocked just about every attempt
nationally to levy such a tax.
The news that soda likely destroys DNA is going to come as a blow to their effor
ts, but unlikely the killer blow while the beverage industry is still able to co
ntrol the public presentation of their drinks with money.
Sports stars and celebrities are paid huge sums to appear on billboards and comm
ercials, creating the fairy tale that drinking these life-shortening drinks is a
ctually all-American, sexy, cool, and indicates your membership of some sought-a
fter club.
Lawmakers are gifted campaign funding to perform the same function at a legislat
ive level to pass the bills that keep the profits flowing.
So long as this persists, Americans are going to keep guzzling the drinks

the na

tion will continue to gain weight, and its citizens ultimately live unhealthier
and shorter lives.