Want some sugar?

Well, just have a soft drink! I think you will be amazed by the amount of sugar that is in a bottle of regular soft drinks. Keep this in mind when you or your kids are drinking one!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F10EyGwd57M

Okay, so you only drink diet soft drinks. Before you start thinking you're doing the right thing...

From MyDiabetesCentral.com:

Even more disturbing is a study this year in the American Heart Association’s journal, Circulation. After tracking the health of more than 6,000 middle-aged adults, researchers found that those who drank one or more soft drinks – whether diet or regular – had an increased risk for metabolic syndrome compared with those who didn’t drink as many. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of risk factors for heart disease and diabetes, including high blood pressure, too much fat around the middle, and low levels of good cholesterol.

The soft drink industry primarily uses aspartame (brand name NutraSweet) in its diet drinks. Diet Rite is the biggest selling non-aspartame diet soda brand. It uses a combination of sucralose and acesulfame potassium.

How could these non-nutritive sweeteners possibly be associated with weight gain and the metabolic syndrome? The authors of the Circulation study led by Ravi Dhingra, MD, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, think that the high level of sweetness “may lead to conditioning for a greater preference for intake of sweetened items.”That’s controversial. But an even more disturbing mechanism that the authors propose is that, “The caramel content of both regular and diet drinks may be a potential source of advanced glycation end products, which may promote insulin resistance and can be proinflammatory.”

The trouble with diet drinks is that they are "tricking" your body with the sweetness. Even though the sweet is sugar free, it still creates a growing wish for sweet things in your body. This is particularly unfortunate news for me, a heavy diet soft drink abuser.

So, just like the plain, old fashioned exercises I am having you do--we need to go back to drinking plain, old fashioned water.