He feels low. His body needs a boost. He reaches into his pocket and finds a dollar bill. He slides it into the machine and a can rolls out. He opens the can and guzzles. He feels his energy return. His fix will last a couple of hours, enough to keep him alert for the rest of the morning.
The addict is 12 years old and his drug is a soft drink, purchased from a vending machine. This addict and thousands like him will attend special classes, sponsored by his school, to warn him about the dangers of drugs, tobacco and alcohol. But no one will tell him about America’s other drinking problem.
According to the National Soft Drink Association (NSDA), consumption of soft drinks is now over 600 12-ounce servings (12 oz.) per person per year. Since 1978, soda consumption in the US has tripled for boys and doubled for girls. Young males age 12-29 are the biggest consumers at over 160 gallons per year—that’s almost 2 quarts per day.
While our children are constantly exposed to publicity for soft drinks, evidence of their dangers accumulates. Research has been released from a dietary study of 80,000 people, at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, showing that people who drink soft drinks or add sugar to their coffee increase their risk of developing pancreatic cancer by 90 percent.
Advocates of a healthy life-style recognize that consuming even as little as one or two sodas per day is undeniably connected to a myriad of pathologies. The most commonly associated health risks are obesity, diabetes and other blood sugar disorders, tooth decay, osteoporosis and bone fractures, nutritional deficiencies, heart disease, food addictions and eating disorders, neurotransmitter dysfunction from chemical sweeteners, and neurological and adrenal disorders from caffeine.
Warnings about the dangers of soft drink consumption came to us as early as 1942 when the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Council on Food and Nutrition made the following statement: “From the health point of view it is desirable especially to have restriction of such use of sugar as is represented by consumption of sweetened carbonated beverages and forms of candy which are of low nutritional value.
Since that time the first notable public outcry came in 1998, 56 years later, when the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) published a paper called “Liquid Candy” blasting the food industry for “mounting predatory marketing campaigns aimed at children and adolescents.” At a press conference, CSPI set up 868 cans of soda to represent the amount of soda the average young male consumed during the prior year.
One problem that has become common among teenagers is gastrointestinal distress or chronic “stomach ache”. Many brands of sodas contain caffeine, which increases stomach acid levels. Sodas also contain an array of chemical acids as additives, such as acetic, fumaric, gluconic and phosphoric acids, all of them synthetically produced. That is why certain sodas work so well when used to clean car engines. For human consumption, however, the effects are much less satisfying. Drinking sodas, especially on an empty stomach, can upset the fragile acid-alkaline balance of the stomach and other gastric lining, creating a continuous acid environment which can lead to painful inflammation of the stomach and duodenal lining. Over the long term, it can lead to gastric lining erosion.
School administrators are caught between demands of a few parents for a saner food policy and the need for more funds in the face of dwindling school budgets.
Perhaps we need to look at the Philippines’ devised plan which would allow citizens to cash in on the country’s “junk food diet” by taxing every liter bottle of carbonated soft drink sold. If the US taxed soft drink sales, the new income stream generated could then be distributed to declining school budgets. Is this not a better idea than forcing our schools to sell their souls to soft drink companies?
The alarm has been sounded! Are you listening? I strongly encourage all who are concerned about the health of our country to consider the debilitating consequences of drinking soft drinks. How many more studies and reports need to be published before we notice the tragedy lurking ahead? In the 1970s, we finally recognized the risks of smoking. In the 1990s, the problem of teenage drinking became widely known. This millennium is the time for awakening to the risks of soda consumption—America’s other drinking problem.
(Janice Norris lives in Heber Springs, has a B.S. in home economics from Murray State University, taught home economics, owned and operated health food stores in Illinois and Heber Springs, has taught numerous health and nutrition classes, and wrote a weekly newspaper column in Illinois for 15 years. She can be reached at janicenorris34@yahoo.com)
