Is Drinking Soda Pop Harming Our Kids?

One of the newest crazes in America is drinking bottled water. You can find it everywhere and anywhere. It's bottled under many different brand names, and it's carried on store shelves across the United States. Instead of having a Coke with your Big Mac™ or your Wendy's® Single hamburger, you can now have a bottle of water instead. That's good news, isn't it? With the craze about drinking bottled water, you would think that we Americans are drinking more of it. But, that's not often the case. Soda pop is still ranked as the number 1 drink among our youth. So then, the next question is, is drinking soda pop harming our youth?

Soda pop- no matter what brand or what flavor- is basically made up of flavored sugar water. There aren't any nutrients in this popular beverage. Instead, besides the sugar, (or Aspartame™ or Nutrasweet™ in the diet versions), many kinds of soda pop contain ingredients such as carbonated water, caffeine, and phosphoric acid. 

Note: Are you curious about Aspartame? Find out more about it here:
www.associatedcontent.com/article/33014/aspartame_poisoning_from_sweetener.html.

Sugar is known to cause a variety of health problems in humans. A twelve-ounce can of soda pop contains an average of 39 grams of sugars. With the increasing problem of obesity in kids and the popularity of drinking soda pop, the two seem to go hand in hand. Studies show that twelve-year-old kids who drink soda pop are more prone to obesity than kids who don't drink the fizzy beverage. Sugar supplies empty calories. It also promotes tooth decay. You probably already know these facts.

What you may not know, is that drinking soda pop is harmful to our kids because sugar lowers the immunity system. For five or more hours after taking in sugar, the white blood cells have a lower ability to kill bacteria.