This is your body on soda (or pop for my northern cousins)!

Do you keep hearing (and tuning it out) all the bad news about soda and the obesity epidemic? Maybe you shouldn't be tuning it out like I did for years. By the time you finish drinking one sugary sweet soda your body is nudging you toward another one. Now I know why those 2 liters I used to knock out (at least one a day) managed to disappear so easily. As soon as you swallow it, your pancreas is notified and rapidly begins to create insulin in response to the sugar in the soda. Insulin is used by the body to move sugar from your soda drink into the bloodstream, where cells are then able to it for energy. Within just 20 minutes, your blood sugar levels spike and your liver responds by turning that sugar into fat for storage. Now that happened to me a lot too. I guess that’s where the sugar from all those 2 liters went! Within 45 minutes of gulping down a single 20-ounce glass of soda, caffeine from the drink is fully absorbed, and as a result your pupils dilate and blood pressure rises. Your body produces more dopamine, which stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain like a low-grade line of cocaine. Did this make me a dope? I ask myself. Probably, I answer myself! Because in the next five minutes you’re going to experience a blood sugar crash, the want another soda or sweet to keep the happy going and Harvard researchers have calculated each addition soda consumed increases the risk of obesity 1.6 times. All this and the fact that soda has no actual nutritive value are reason enough to cut it out of your diet. I’m glad I did!