What would happen to your body if you stopped drinking soda?
If you regularly or even occasionally drink regular or diet soda, you’ll want to read this.
In this blog, I go over what drinking soda does to the system and how cutting it out of your diet could benefit you from a doctor’s perspective.
Benefits of Cutting Out Soda
There are a lot of health benefits that can result from cutting soda out of your diet, because drinking soda negatively impacts your health in a lot of different ways.
Weight Loss
First, there’s going to be weight loss when you cut out a sugary drink like soda, or even diet soda, because it’s putting in empty calories and doesn’t make you feel full.
That’s why soda drinkers often keep going back to that vice multiple times a day.
It doesn’t fill you up, but you’re taking in an incredible amount of sugar or chemicals.
In fact, drinking soda can cause significant weight gain over time, even if it is a diet-version drink, because it makes you want to eat more.
When you are drinking the soda, your calorie intake is going to be higher, and so is the amount of high-fructose corn syrup and sugar going into the system.
That’s the number one cause of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is exploding in the world right now.
Obesity is primarily driven by excess soda, so you’re likely going to lose 1-3 pounds of weight almost instantly within the first week.
I’ve also seen joint pains and similar things disappear.
The more soda you drink, the more fructose you take in; unless it’s a diet version, but then you’re taking in chemicals.
When chemicals and fructose hit the liver, the body has a problem keeping up because they’re so dense and sugar-laden.
It’s got to either burn it up or store it, and most people are not exercising enough to burn it off.
Decreased Organ Fat
Fatty liver starts to form when fat forms more around the visceral organs, rather than just under the skin.
Drinking soda skyrockets the amount of fat around the organs.
Liver fat builds up from the chemicals and sugar, which is a major problem because it impacts your heart, fluid retention in your body, and your overall health.
When you cut out soda, you might not see your waistline shrink right away, but the fat around your intestines, liver, and heart is going to start melting away.
Studies have linked soda drinking directly to increased visceral fat, so you’re going to start losing fat around the organs.
Visceral fat is the type of fat linked to chronic disease, not the fat on the surface that we don’t like the look of.
Lower Metabolic Syndrome Risk
If you have a high triglyceride problem or cholesterol issue and cut out soda, you might see an impact on your cholesterol and triglyceride levels.
You’re also going to see insulin and blood sugar go down.
Why does that matter?
That drives metabolic syndrome, which is a group of conditions including high blood pressure, high triglycerides, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, and heart failure.
Your reduction in all of those is going to be significant because there’s going to be way less sugar floating around in your blood.
Your insulin levels going down will take you out of fat-storage mode and increase fat-burning mode.
Studies have found that for every can of soda that you cut out each day, even if you can’t get completely off of it, you’re going to reduce your type 2 diabetes risk by 1.1%.
Each can is a 1% reduction. If you’re drinking 10 cans of soda a day, you are linked to a 10% higher risk of diabetes.
You may not be able to quit cold turkey, but whatever you can cut out counts a lot when it comes to type 2 diabetes, which is a major cause of death in the world.
Increased Energy & Nutrient Content
First, you’re no longer going to have the sugar crashes that come from taking in that much sugar, so quitting soda could actually help your energy levels.
Soda is also an anti-nutrient, which means that not only does it not provide you with any nutrients, it takes up the space that actual nutrients could have filled.
Once you cut soda, you’ll be able to absorb more nutrients into your body.
Lower Heart Disease & Cancer Risk
Your heart is going to be impacted.
Studies show that reducing your soda intake by one can a day is linked to a 20% reduction in heart disease long-term, especially in men.
Another massive study showed that those who drank two or more sodas a day had an 87% higher risk of pancreatic cancer.
Soda is hard on insulin, which is the blood sugar controller of your pancreas.
Decreased Inflammation & Risk of Gout
The amount of inflammation you have, including joint inflammation, goes down as a result of putting less sugar into your system.
Gout is a very painful inflammatory condition that often hurts the big toe joints. It’s tied to acid buildup in the body, and soda is a huge source of acid.
Research has shown that soda drinkers have a 75% increased chance of having gout.
If you stop drinking soda, it could save you a lot of pain.
Increased Teeth Health
Reducing the amount of soda you drink also has a significant impact on the health of your teeth.
Soda’s acidity decays away the teeth’s enamel and its protective layers.
This can result in a lot of cavities and dental work, and if you have to get teeth pulled, you can’t get them back. You can get implants, but it’s never the same again.
Protecting your teeth is much easier when you cut out the soda.
Why Diet Soda Is A Bad Idea
You may just say that you’re going to cut out all the sugar and go to diet soda. That’s a bad idea because the chemicals in diet soda have been proven to increase weight gain.
The chemicals and artificial sweeteners in diet sodas are really hard on the body. They can destroy the microbiome, which is going to make your gut leaky over time.
This means more chemicals and more toxins in your bloodstream, which is the primary driver of autoimmune diseases.
If you have lupus, a thyroid condition, arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, or osteoarthritis, the last thing you want to drink is a diet soda.
Diet sodas are still incredibly hard on the teeth because of the acid content and chemical content.
They also increase the risk of headaches. A lot of people deal with migraine headaches, or headaches in general, because those chemicals build up in the system and trigger neurological responses.
Diet sodas are also harmful to your bones. One study of 17,000 people showed that regularly drinking diet soda decreased bone density and increased fracture risk.
If you have osteoporosis or osteopenia, it’s a good idea to cut out diet soda.
Plus, diet sodas still have a direct link to heart disease risk. Drinking two or more diet sodas per day is linked to an increased risk of heart disease.
So cutting out diet soda is going to be heart-healthy.
The Impact of Artificial Sweeteners On The Body
Now, when you drink diet soda, you’re often taking in something called aspartame, which is an artificial sweetener.
Artificial sweeteners create immune damage and oxidative stress, and have also been linked to fibromyalgia.
That’s going to result in extra inflammation being in your body, and we’ve talked about what that does to the joints and how it destroys the gut microbiome.
But aspartame can also have an impact on your mood.
In fact, three prominent studies show that the higher the amount of aspartame in your diet, the higher the amount of depression that you experience.
So cutting out diet soda could make you happier!
Aspartame accumulates in the blood and increases the risk of hereditary blood disorders.
Those chemicals floating around in your system are also really hard on the liver, so you’ll have cleaner blood and liver without diet soda.
If that wasn’t enough, there’s a 2012 study that linked diet sodas directly to Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which is a type of cancer involving white blood cells and inflammation in the system.
The Science Behind Soda Addiction
If you’re hooked on soda or you’ve made the switch to diet soda, hopefully the benefits of quitting help you break that habit.
But going cold turkey can be extremely difficult. Studies have proven that soda can be as addictive as drugs to the brain.
There’s a physical addiction that happens because dopamine hits your brain when you drink it, and starts to hit when you know you’re going to have the next one.
You have to change your routine and disconnect the neural pathways that give you that happiness as a result of soda-drinking.
How do we begin to break it?
What are some other drinks that might satisfy the craving and ease the pain of coming off of it for the people that are addicted to it?
Healthy Soda Alternatives
Here’s a simple Amazon store link to a list my wife and I put together full of simple drinks that we have in our house or would consider drinking.
We don’t make any of these drinks, but there are some good options if you want to find something to replace soda with.
There are a couple of teas and coffees on that list.
We like to drink a lot of sparkling water, and Spindrift is one of our favorites. It even has a variety of different flavors.
Water’s obviously going to be the healthiest alternative to soda, but there’s also OLIPOP, which is sort of a sparkling prebiotic soda.
That way you’re getting some benefit to the gut as opposed to taking away from it.
Finally, there’s Zevia, which is a Stevia-sweetened drink. If you’re sensitive to Stevia, then this might be a no-go.
I like this a lot better because you’re not going to have the calories.
It’s non-GMO as well, so you’re not getting that impact. This is a decent solution for helping you to get off soda and diet soda, if you’re not into coffee or tea.
If you drink soda, whether it’s diet or regular, it’s certainly having significant impacts on your health, but you can break that habit, and it is well worth it.
