Thistle Dew Nutrition

Ramblings from a "Simpler" and perpertual student of natural health, with a strong focus on how to eat well to prevent chronic diseases.

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Location: Saugatuck, Michigan, United States

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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Can't stop from saying "I told you so!"

While sitting in my family room last night, doing Sudoku puzzles and watching the news I had this overwhelming desire to shout out “I told you so!”
OK, I know that’s just not nice, but I feel so much better now.
And here is WebMD’s report on the same, um, report:


July 23, 2007 -- Drinking just one soft drink a day -- whether diet or regular -- may boost your risk of getting heart disease, a new study shows.
That is because a soda habit increases the risk of developing a condition called metabolic syndrome, according to the new research, and that in turn boosts the chance of getting both heart disease and diabetes.
"Even one soda per day increases your risk of developing metabolic syndrome by about 50%," says Ramachandran Vasan, MD, professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and the senior author of the study, published in the July 31 issue of the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.
To be diagnosed with
metabolic syndrome, three of five criteria must be met: a large waistline, elevated blood pressure, elevated fasting blood sugar, elevated fasting triglycerides, or reduced HDL or "good" cholesterol.
"This study adds to the wealth of scientific evidence that sugar-sweetened beverages increase the risk of metabolic syndrome," says Vasan. Already, he says, the rise in sugary drink consumption has been linked to the epidemic of obesity and diabetes among children and teens and to the development of high blood pressure in adults.
Even after adjusting for intake of fat, fiber consumption, total calories, smoking, and physical activity, he says, there was still a link between soft drink intake and metabolic risk factors.
To read the entire WebMD article please click on this link:


http://www.webmd.com/news/20070723/1-daily-soda-may-boost-heart-disease?page=1

And so many of you are wondering how sugar-free soda’s can affect these results? There are two theories that I know of, and probably more theories, and they might both be factors. First, as the WebMD article goes on to say (if you click the link and read the whole thing) drinking sweet beverages, whether they have calories or not, might condition the drinker to crave more sweet foods as well. This goes hand-in-hand with what Dr. Russell Blaylock writes about in his book “Excitotoxins”; that except in Type I diabetics Aspartame actually tricks the brain into telling the body to express Insulin even though there isn’t any sugar in the system, thus lowering your blood sugar and making you hungry and craving sweets to raise it back to normal levels again.

So what do we drink? The same stuff we’ve been drinking for a thousand years: water, beer, wine, milk, fresh juice (in moderation) and many different kinds of unsweetened teas.

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