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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."
According to the article, the people were drinking 3 to 7 LITERS a day. That is a lot.
If you drank 7 liters of pure water a day you would probably suffer from low potassium as a result of electrolytes being flushed our in your urine. The US-RDA for water is 2 liters of water (8 cups) per day.
Not to mention, eating 2-3 bananas over the course of the day would probably correct the problem.
Hypokalemia is very dramatic. Not. According to Wikipedia:
Mild hypokalemia is often without symptoms, although it may cause a small elevation of blood pressure,[5] and can occasionally provoke cardiac arrhythmias. Moderate hypokalemia, with serum potassium concentrations of 2.5-3 mEq/L, may cause muscular weakness, myalgia, and muscle cramps (owing to disturbed function of the skeletal muscles), and constipation (from disturbed function of smooth muscles).
In other words you might have cramps and the likes, and be constipated. And what's the no less dramatic cure to this terrible ailment? Oral potassium chloride supplements (Klor-Con, Sando-K, Slow-K) or just eating leafy green vegetables, tomatoes, citrus fruits, oranges or bananas.
Really, thanks for that Slashdot. While we're at it, did you know that it is estimated that over 40% of the population has B12 deficiency, and that it can cause tiredness, decreased mental work capacity, decreased concentration and decreased memory, irritability and depression?
You just got troll'd!
Generalize much?
2 liters of cola has about 220mg of caffeine. Twenty ounces of reasonably strong black coffee (e.g. starbucks) has a bit over 400mg, and many people drink a few cups a day.
If the problem with cola were due to the caffeine, we'd have found the problem already in coffee drinkers who have already been studied to hell and back by people who'd just love to ban yet another enjoyable chemical.
No, as mentioned above the "problem" is probably that the sheer volume of cola flushes out potassium, and maybe the sugar accelerates metabolism or something.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Actually, it's right.
I'll preface this with... INAHN (I'm not a health nut), I'm just very aware of the bad things that I consume. I'm smoking a cigarette and drinking a tall glass of cold soda while I'm writing this. :)
"natural" products, that aren't manufactured, but just bottled, are ok, but rather rare in most stores.
"manufactured" products usually contain refined sugars, preservatives, artificial colors, etc, etc. The're all bad for you.
The human body isn't designed to handle refined sugars very well. It does ok with raw sugar, but only in reasonable quantities. If they used raw sugar in the quantity that shows up in most sodas, it's bad for you. There was a recent study (and review of historical data) that showed the instances of diabetes were virtually nil compared to now. The major contributor? refined sugars.
Caffeine free soda has more bad stuff in it, just not caffeine.
Diet or sugar free sodas have artificial sweeteners that are cancer causing (among other things). Myself, I can't drink any diet soda. Even just a sip, and I'll have a migraine for the next 8 hours. I've been very unhappy during road trips, if/when I stop at a drive through and they hand me a diet soda instead of the regular one I ordered. One sip, and now I have 8 hours of driving where it feels my brain is going to explode.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Are you trying to suggest that aspartame (or whatever the newest artificial sweetener is) is healthy?
The truth is:
soda is bad for you and makes you fat.
"diet" soda is bad for you and makes you fat (correlation). (it does not make you lose weight according to any study).
"diet" soda uses various artificial sweeteners, of which the long term health consequences are not known.
Yes, a very very slow bullet.
I'm not sure what a "showel" is, but: There is no convincing evidence that moderate consumption of aspartame causes harm. The evidence was all from "accelerated failure studies", where they gave mice extreme doses and extrapolated back to normal consumption. Well, that's not bad for a first approximation, and diet drinks had a cancer warning label for a while. However, the studies were refuted early on and now time has borne out that the studies were incorrect. There's apparently a threshold effect, and under a certain dosage (which is quite high), it's perfectly safe.
For very small values of "perfect."
Artificial sweeteners may not be the certain cancer death they were once thought to be. However, there's still a few issues with them:
* Asparatame breaks down into asparatase and methyl alcohol at higher temperatures, such as those used in baking, and during certain chemical processes, such as the digestive process. Methyl alcohol is toxic to humans.
* Sucralose interacts badly with certain medications, including those taken by cancer patients to prevent recurrences.
* ALL sweeteners, regardless of their source or chemical composition, trigger insulin production in the same way that sugar does. This is a reflexive response, where the body ramps up insulin production in response to the *taste* of sweet, not waiting until blood sugar actually goes up. This results in lower blood sugar levels in response to non-nutritive sweeteners, which induces hunger and sugar/carb cravings. This is why switching to diet soda from regular causes weight *gain* rather than loss in often-replicated studies.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
There is no convincing evidence that moderate consumption of aspartame causes harm.
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."
January 1981-- Donald Rumsfeld, CEO of Searle, states in a sales meeting that he is going to make a big push to get aspartame approved within the year. Rumsfeld says he will use his political pull in Washington, rather than scientific means, to make sure it gets approved.
January 21, 1981-- Ronald Reagan is sworn in as President of the United States. Reagan's transition team, which includes Donald Rumsfeld, CEO of G. D. Searle, hand picks Dr. Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. to be the new FDA Commissioner.
March, 1981-- An FDA commissioner's panel is established to review issues raised by the Public Board of Inquiry.
May 19, 1981-- Three of six in-house FDA scientists who were responsible for reviewing the brain tumor issues, Dr. Robert Condon, Dr. Satya Dubey, and Dr. Douglas Park, advise against approval of NutraSweet, stating on the record that the Searle tests are unreliable and not adequate to determine the safety of aspartame.
July 15, 1981-- In one of his first official acts, Dr. Arthur Hayes Jr., the new FDA commissioner, overrules the Public Board of Inquiry, ignores the recommendations of his own internal FDA team and approves NutraSweet for dry products.
You can't take the sky from me...
No.
Your assumption that "diet" soda helps with obesity is statistically false.
And it tastes really bad.
If "diet" does not really help with being fat, would you really choose aspartame over sugar.
Swallowing tooth paste is possibly harmless too. I just wouldn't do it every day, just in case.
Ha, and bananas have a reputation for high potassium content. So much for that idea.
Reminds me of the mistake that was made about spinach. They thought spinach had just ungodly amounts of iron, etc., turns out the original research on the issue had misplaced a decimal, giving spinach 10 times more iron content than it actually had. By then, Popeye was already a popular character and I doubt the meme has lost steam to this day.
Luckily, I love spinach :P In fact, I love almost all vegetables. The only vegetable dish I'm not too fond of are extreme for other reasons: notably one particular Kimchee experience (I once had kimchee that was far too strong for me, despite loving spicy foods), and Natto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natto). DON'T TRY NATTO! You've been warned. (But if you're curious, just imagine the sights, smell, and taste of eating someone else's puke and that just about perfectly captures the experience-- I am not kidding).
"Popeye's creators chose spinach -- instead of, say, brussels sprouts or broccoli -- because of an 1870 German study that claimed spinach contained about as much iron as there is in red meat!
In reality, this was nothing more than an accounting error. The scientists put the decimal point in the wrong place!
The iron content of spinach is actually one-tenth of what was reported. The mistake was corrected in 1937. It was too late for Popeye, though. He'd already been getting strong on spinach for almost 10 years!" from (http://soundmedicine.iu.edu/segment.php4?seg=238)
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
While that's perfectly logical and well-reasoned it flies in the face of actual real-world studies. Science now knows (for certain, using statistics and actual data) that drinking diet soda versus regular soda has no positive impact whatsoever on obesity rates. Source In fact, that article actually claims that diet soda drinkers are MORE likely than their regular soda drinking counterparts to be obese.
Now, as the article points out, correlation isn't causation, but the taste of diet soda combined with no proof of its efficacy as a weight reducing substance means that I'll certainly never consider drinking it.
As long as your urine is clear or very pale, you're properly hydrated.
Also, many orange juices have sugar added. And many of the "low sugar" ones just add sugar substitutes! As though it wasn't sweet enough.
Most geeks can not carry stuff > 50 pounds. No wonder why.
The problem is, if you are in IT, you are expected to move machines around, and they ranged from 50 to 100 pounds.
And that is also why in most of the time, most IT supervisor does NOT have an CS or IT degree. I have seen interviewers that only has a music degree.
New Economic Perspectives
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).
Life is grand.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Multivitamins are no different to having a diet that consists of fresh fruit, vegetables and meats. While not the best substitute for a decent diet, to say that vitamins aren't natural is just stupid.
No. No. Yes to the the stupid bit.
IAAAHN (i AM actually a health nut): There are a multitude of beneficial micro-nutrients, anti-oxidants and other compounds in fruits and vegetable, legumes and meats, that you simply don't these get through a popping a multi-vitamin, thus even a comprehensive vitamin and mineral supplement can never replace a good diet.
Plants contain beneficial phytochemicals, flavinoids, anti-inflamiatory compounds, fatty-acids, amino acids, etc, etc. even the soluble fibre and insoluble roughage are highly beneficial to the essential life-supporting colony of bacteria that you are a host to. It's important not to ignore them either, your are a walking colony of your single-celled ancestors descendants, and guess what, a lot of them are along for the ride in your guts - there are 10 times as many cells in your body that are not you as human cells are more than 100 times larger than the bacteria in your gut.
Put simply a full spectrum multi-vitamin would not replace vegetables without about 100-150 different compounds.
Not eating your greens and eating too much processed foods seriously fraks with your internal biota, there's plenty of thought that suggests this is the cause or at least implicated in many modern ills.
You won't develop deficiency and/or die if you don't have these compounds, you can live without them. However the human body has actually evolved ingesting all these fringe nutrients, it stands to reason this is why our health benefits from these compounds. Some would argue they might as well be considered essential based on the benefit to our longevity and physical function.
Their really aren't any shortcuts to good health. Its a no-brainer that the key to good health is following the lifestyle that our bodies and minds evolved in. Exercise and wholefoods and time outdoors, you can't escape, ditch the cola and go for a jog.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Most of those vitamins are artificial ones and added back in after pasteurization.
Drinking orange juice for its vitamin content, is literally paying a few thousand-percent markup on vitamin pills. Seriously. Just take a multi-vitamin (which costs practically nothing), and then drink whatever you want to drink.
The "healthfulness" of juice is >99% marketing.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Arsenic is natural. Tobacco is natural. Multivitamins are artificial.
Well then, why don't _you_ go on to only consume "natural" products, and be happy with your "natural" human lifespan of about 25 years, while the rest of us consume all these weird "manufactured" foods and enjoy our 80+ year lifespans...
Just as the article states that the excessive drinking of cola drinks can cause problems with low potassium. What it doesn't tell you is that the phosphoric acid found in these drinks can also lead to being hypocalcemic. As the acid usually displaces the calcium that's found in the blood stream, and raises the phosphoric levels. The side affects of hypocalcemia can range from numbing/tingling of the extremities, tetany(seizing of the muscle), all the way to seizures and even death in most extreme cases. To those who have a rare condition called Hypoparathyroidism, it can become life threatening withing minutes of we call a "crash". We use the term "crash" to signify that the blood calcium to have suddenly dropped to low levels and start become symptomatic. When that happens and the person can't get bring the levels back up. The next course of action would to get the person to emergency room as fast as possible. The thing is anyone can become hypocalcemic at anytime. Especially when they are on really poor diet.
Strawman/false dichotomy. He didn't say, "if it's natural, it's good for you".
But I agree the truth would be better served by a little more precision: If it's manufactured to taste good to you while being cheap to produce, it's almost always bad for you in the long run.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
...one word: ASPARTAME! And to think a whole generation of kids have had this toxic stuff put in their food & drinks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame I've decided to stick to drinking water & non-concentrated fresh fruit juices, a much better option if you care about your health.
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
This condition is a result of low potassium. Just eat a freakin banana or two.
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....
I was 4-5 years ago a heavy Coca-Cola, Fanta and Sprite user. Before that Pepsi Max.
I drank about 3-6 liter a week.
Then suddenly one day, I got stomach pains from Fanta. Coca-Cola had just changed the bottle of the Fanta and same time seems to have changed the mixture as well someway. Because the color was clearly different on the store shelfs where was old and new bottle next each other.
So I changed to Coca-Cola and used it one year without problems. Then again, suddenly I started to get problems of urinating. I got feeling that I need to go bathroom to pass some water but never actually had anything.
On that time I made choice to stop using all that stuff.
And after few years on friend of my passed to me a Coca-Cola drink on the bar (I do not drink alcohol or coffee/tee and I have never drank those) and it was just 0.33cl bottle and I got same problem 5min after drinkin it.
But, I have other problems now as well. My motor functions on my hand and leg muscles starts trembling if I take 0.33cl or more.
You can not see it, but I can feel it how some muscles just twitch little bit and It does not feel nice when it takes about 3-4 hours as that.
If those drinks would be invented now, they would never pass haleness authorities tests. Those are just poison for humans and we let our childrens to drink those every day.
It is just too bad thing to even think that we can not turn those off because the companies who manufacture those, like Coca-Cola, are too powerfull and rich to keep their companies running.
And what makes even worse (and funny in first time) is that most WHO recommences are paid by those companies, about how much a day you can enjoy of cola, ice-cream, chocolate etc.
When you check out the sponsors of all studies about the daily sugar amount what is "good", you only find those big companies who manufactures all candies, sodas and other stuff.
There is many other studies, what ain't paid by those companies and all the amounts what got enough for daily usage for adult human, was almost every situation a 1/10 of the same suggestions of what these companies has paid.
And you can think it this way.
On these days humans eat more healthy, they have removed fat almost totally. But same time we use more sugar, white flour, artificial fat from vegetable oil (vegetable fat does not exist anywhere on the world in that form. Totally artificial! It was designed on WWII on UK when there was not enough cattle to get real fat and people needed fat to bake. So scientics developed artificial fat from vegetable oil. Because oil could not be used on baking. And that does not include anything good for humans, just stress more human body than real fat what goes through the human body if not overused).
Human race will eventually vanish itself by just these big companies.
Oh, and have you seen the Supersize me Document? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1432315846377280008
Who says we should eat 3 meals a day every day? How about: put more effort into selecting and preparing our meals, eat fewer meals! I find I'm way less hungry if I go longer without eating - as I'm not constantly 3 or 4 hours after the last big meal. The hunger sensation goes away if you get past it (a good analogy is the vibrations of breaking the "sound barrier" in a jet airplane, you throttle past it). In the USA, family and friends are so programmed to do the "3 meals a day" thing that practically nobody questions it.
Discovery of this study changed my life. Now, some days I just eat one big meal, I focus more on enjoying that meal. If you have only one meal in a day: 2 hours to enjoy the meal, read while I'm eating or socialize with friends. I focus more on the quality of food, not quantity. Eating less frequently is a lifestyle change, not a diet!
From: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16529878
=======================
"The effect on health of alternate day calorie restriction: eating less and more than needed on alternate days prolongs life."
Restricting caloric intake to 60-70% of normal adult weight maintenance requirement prolongs lifespan 30-50% and confers near perfect health across a broad range of species. Every other day feeding produces similar effects in rodents, and profound beneficial physiologic changes have been demonstrated in the absence of weight loss in ob/ob mice. Since May 2003 we have experimented with alternate day calorie restriction, one day consuming 20-50% of estimated daily caloric requirement and the next day ad lib eating, and have observed health benefits starting in as little as two weeks, in insulin resistance, asthma, seasonal allergies, infectious diseases of viral, bacterial and fungal origin (viral URI, recurrent bacterial tonsillitis, chronic sinusitis, periodontal disease), autoimmune disorder (rheumatoid arthritis), osteoarthritis, symptoms due to CNS inflammatory lesions (Tourette's, Meniere's) cardiac arrhythmias (PVCs, atrial fibrillation), menopause related hot flashes. We hypothesize that other many conditions would be delayed, prevented or improved, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, brain injury due to thrombotic stroke atherosclerosis, NIDDM, congestive heart failure. Our hypothesis is supported by an article from 1957 in the Spanish medical literature which due to a translation error has been construed by several authors to be the only existing example of calorie restriction with good nutrition. We contend for reasons cited that there was no reduction in calories overall, but that the subjects were eating, on alternate days, either 900 calories or 2300 calories, averaging 1600, and that body weight was maintained. Thus they consumed either 56% or 144% of daily caloric requirement. The subjects were in a residence for old people, and all were in perfect health and over 65. Over three years, there were 6 deaths among 60 study subjects and 13 deaths among 60 ad lib-fed controls, non-significant difference. Study subjects were in hospital 123 days, controls 219, highly significant difference. We believe widespread use of this pattern of eating could impact influenza epidemics and other communicable diseases by improving resistance to infection. In addition to the health effects, this pattern of eating has proven to be a good method of weight control, and we are continuing to study the process in conjunction with the NIH.