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Cola Consumption Can Lead To Muscle Problems
wjousts writes "As I'm sure many Slashdot readers live almost exclusively on cola drinks, a new warning from doctors:
'Doctors have issued a warning about excessive cola consumption after noticing an increase in the number of patients suffering from muscle problems, according to the June issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice. ... 'Evidence is increasing to suggest that excessive cola consumption can also lead to hypokalaemia, in which the blood potassium levels fall, causing an adverse effect on vital muscle functions.' And sorry, diet colas aren't any better."
From a physiological perspective, though, the problem is not a lack of potassium. That is a symptom. While it requires treatment, the underlying cause also should be treated
The problem is probably comprised of two main factors: caffeine intoxication and fructose-related diarrhea.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I figured out that cola was bad for you when I heard of the school science experiment where you put old teeth (baby teeth or animal teeth) in cola for a couple of days and let them disintegrate!
I figured out fresh fruit was bad for you when I heard of the school science experiment where you put some fruit on a dish, and a couple days later its covered in toxic molds.
Unless you wander around with a mouthful of cola in your mouth for days at a time, your conclusion is about as absurd as mine is.
Now I'm not arguing cola is good for you, but the experiment you are referring to is irrelevant. After all, the body normally contains far stronger acids than mere cola.
Refined sugar is just as new to our bodies, on the evolutionary time scale, as high fructose corn syrup. Even the volumes associated with the modern concept of fruit juice are new: 12 oz. of orange juice is considered reasonable to drink, even though it's equivalent to eating six oranges in a few minutes. Lots more sugar, and much more frequently, than we had during what I'm sure was a pre-technological paradise. Oh yeah, even "natural" juices often have the vitamins stripped out and added back in after pasteurization. Little difference between orange juice and cola, really. If you like one over the other fine, but it's close to a wash nutritionally.
There's nothing wrong with living your life by various rules of thumb, because it's impossible to get into all of the details in one lifetime. But insisting on the dogmatic conclusions of your heuristics, is sheer insanity.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Arsenic is natural. Tobacco is natural. Multivitamins are artificial.
Oh Jesus, Internet. Not this again. Can't we all agree that the science indicates aspartame is either harmless or barely measurably harmful, and certainly less harmful than the obesity one gets from consuming large amounts of sugar?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Diet or sugar free sodas have artificial sweeteners that are cancer causing (among other things).
That's a myth. It's supported by the fact that most diet sodas used to contain saccharine, which is a sweetener that has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory rats if fed to them in sufficiently large quantities. As a result of these (possibly spurious) studies, most soft drink companies switched their artificial sweetener to aspartame ("Equal") many years ago (in the 1980s), which, as you can see by my link, has definitely not been shown by any studies to cause cancer (or lupus, or diabetes mellitus, or any other such nonsense). Virtually all of the evidence of aspartame causing ailments, including headaches, is entirely anecodotal and unsupported by scientific study.
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OK, the person that wrote the article really needs to stop using the term "cola" in place of "soft drink".
Soft drinks come in many flavors including cola flavor.
From my reading of the article, the soft drink can be any flavor and still be a problem if they contain any of the three ingredients listed (none of which include cola or cola flavor).
Get it right!
Hint: if it's manufactured, it's bad for you.
Sigh. This attitude is silly and I get tired of hearing the "if it's natural it's good for you crowd". Some manufactured things are bad some are good. There are manufactured medicines that save lives every day. And their are all manner of natural things that (e.g. urainium, hemlock, poison frogs, leprosy, lightning) that are bad for you. We should try to learn about ourselves and understand what is good and what is bad and why rather than simply generalizing and passing on a deceptive concept to those we talk with.
"diet soda drinkers are MORE likely than their regular soda drinking counterparts to be obese"
Cuz if you're not fat, why put yourself through diet? It's hardly rocket surgery.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
You know, I've heard a lot of health nuts say a lot of things that they're spewing out of their cumulative asses. I frequently have the urge to light a cigarette, order a rare bloody steak, with a dark Irish beer, and a greasy side of something that'll disgust them.
The fun part is, I'm not overweight. Other than smoking, I appear healthy to any passers by. :)
I'm enjoying this ride right down to the end!
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
September 30, 1980-- The Public Board of Inquiry concludes NutraSweet should not be approved pending further investigations of brain tumors in animals. The board states it "has not been presented with proof of reasonable certainty that aspartame is safe for use as a food additive."
Do you have any idea how much aspartame they force-fed those animals to provoke a (possible) carcinogenic response?
Do you care?
You'll find that the GP made no mention of whether things were "good" or "bad" for you. He simply discusses whether or not certain substances are "natural".
All in the context of the GGGGP...
Multivitamins are different from fresh fruit and veggies. The trouble is this: the vitamins we know about are not really the whole story. They are more like narrow-band tracers that we understand and can generally be used to locate a wider band of nutrients. The narrow band is helpful, but it is better for you to get the the wider range of neighbors. And the more we refine something (to make it into a pill or a supplement to dump into food or whatever), the more we strip away the nearby neighbors and get something that is purely the tracer nutrient.
Plus, taking vitamins is a sort of crutch to keep you from noticing the good cravings and seeking out the food with the nutrient you need. If you can only get high-calorie, low-nutrient food, then yeah you should take the vitamins. But you are still missing some stuff, like fiber. And medical science is not perfect, it doesn't know everything you need. In a decade or two, it could be discovered that one or five really helpful nutrients had been historically overlooked, and people who were relying on the vitamin crutch were not getting the completeness they expected. Not really the vitamin manufacturers' fault, somewhat the doctors' fault, and quite your fault for not eating good food.
More broadly...cutting out excess carbs, especially from refined food really helps cut down on the weight, and insulin spikes...and so many other things that seem to kill us as humans.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yeah, OK. Or I can take a nearly-free multi-vitamin which is like eating my fill of every fruit and vegetable on the face of the planet, instantly, and with a net zero calories which I can spend later on the tastier cola (or to be frugal, water).
A multi-vitamin and a sugary drink (or water) is not even close to the equivalent to eating your fill of fruits and veggies. Yes, you will meet or exceed your bodies vitamin and mineral requirements, but you'll be completely lacking in phytonutrients, fiber, fatty acids and anti-oxidants. The human body requires a lot more than just vitamins, minerals and simple carbohydrates!
no positive impact whatsoever on obesity rates.
Statistics is that they don't necessarily apply to the individual, though. I lost 20 pounds recently, and while part of it was strict diet and exercise, part of it was cutting out crap like soda. But sometimes I want a soda, so I have diet soda. Technically I'm obese but my BMI is well on the way to merely overweight.
I have an alternate hypothesis about the diet soda statistic. Based on my own experience, if someone trying to lose weight isn't drinking only water, they might be doing it wrong. You have to get used to eating healthy and drinking healthy. For a while it seems like your are eating/living bland, but you get used to it and a healthy diet tastes normal while really rich foods taste really rich.
Maintaining weight is easy, and diet foods can be a help in that. But losing weight involves a lifestyle change that is torture at first but which gets easier with time. I used to drink a lot of sweetened stuff. Now it's mostly water, and I really enjoy drinking water all the time. Diet soda is like false hope. Anything in life worth having requires sacrifice, and giving someone soda that has no calories can be like telling them they don't have to sacrifice.
giving someone soda that has no calories can be like telling them they don't have to sacrifice.
This, to me, is the essential problem with consumer culture ; the advertisers insistence that "You can have it all! At negligible personal cost!", hence products like Olestra, that lets you eat fatty food with no fat calories (at the cost of greasy anal leakage, niiiiice).
For many of the things that are finest, the cost is part of what makes them worthwhile ; I love my prowess with code, partly because of how hard won it was (and partly because it's still gosh-darned cool to make a computer do exactly what you told it to). I love my home-baked bread, because I made it. And I love my daughter not just because she's my daughter, but for the person she is - and she wouldn't be that person without a lot of damn hard work by both her parents.
Drinks? I stick to plain tea and coffee for stimulants, and water or watered fruit juice to quench my thirst. If I'm feeling expansive I'll dilute the juice with soda water. And I probably spend what I saved on soda on a good beer a few times a week.
I don't think GP was saying that, for example potassium supplements aren't worth anything. Or that multi-vitamins in general aren't worth anything. Rather that our multi-vitamins may be lacking in things we aren't aware of or don't think is important currently.