Yesterday, I told you that my recommendation would be to stop drinking coffee, so today I'm going to continue being a killjoy, and give you another recommendation, which is to stop drinking soda/cola/pop, or whatever it's being called these days. Where I grew up it was called soda, midwesterners call it pop, and southerners, cola. Whatever it's called, it isn't good for you.

The media has often referred to the cola wars. What they want to talk about is the marketing rivalry between Coca Cola and Pepsi. It makes for interesting reading (if you're a marketer or businessman) but the real cola war is the one that these things do to damage your health.

Let me put it to you this way:

Cola beverages have absolutely zero nutritional value. None, nada, zip, zilch.

What your body needs is pure clean water, and that hasn't changed since the dawn of mankind.

But what tens of millions of people do is reach for a can, or bottle of soda, or even worse,
diet soda, instead. Instead of pure clean water, they are ingesting an artificially colored,
chemically flavored mixture of carbonated water, phosphoric acid, sweeteners (including the absolutely horrible high fructose corn syrup), preservatives, and caffeine.

If it's a regular cola, it contains at least 9 teaspoons of sugar. In response, your blood
glucose levels rise quickly, and your pancreas pours out insulin.

Yesterday, I talked about the size of a cup of coffee. With colas, it's even crazier. A normal convenience store size is 32 ounces, and they go all the way to 64 ounces. The 44 ounce cola is the most popular size. That amounts to 3 and a half cans of cola, and 32 teaspoons of sugar at a time, which is beyond what your body is designed to deal with.

If you want to lose some weight fast, stop drinking soda. I know many people who have
dropped 10-15 pounds in a month, just by doing this one thing.

Diet cola is even worse.

What happens here, is that your brain registers the intense sweetness of the artificial sweetener, and instructs the intestinal tract to prepare for an enormous intake of calories. Your body creates enzymes to convert future calories to fat, just as it always has. So even though the beverage has only one calorie...you remain primed to create fat, as soon as you consume some real food. The more artificial sweeteners you consume...the more likely you are to gain weight.

By the way, neither your brain, or your body, recognize the concept of one calorie.

And in addition, colas are also a very significant caffeine delivery system, just like coffee.

This is one of the reasons that supplementation is so important in today’s world. All these fake foods are depleting our bodies of what they really need to function.