How Does Soda Affect the Human Body?

Video Transcript

"How does soda affect the body is a really interesting question because it's many fold. Everyone knows that soda has a certain amount of sugar in it, but it's not just sugar itself. It's the types of sugar that soda has that causes your body to be confused about how to process it. High fructose corn syrup, which is now all the rage. Everybody's talking about it. What it really is is a false sugar. Corn syrup in and of itself is just a plain syrup. It doesn't taste like anything. The high...the high fructose is what they take natural sugar and they actually strip it of its nutrients, and they just leave the sweetness of it. And then what they do is they add certain ingredients to it, sometimes even formaldehyde, which people don't realize, to add back into that sweetness to boost it so they don't have to use as much of it. It's a filler, so what happens is you're drinking a lot of filler, and it strips your body of all its minerals, all its nutrients, and it actually tricks your body. Like the diet soda with all the Nutrasweet and all the extra stuff that they're doing, what happens is that stuff actually tricks your body into thinking you're not going to get as many calories from the sweetness, so you actually eat or drink twice as much of that ingredient because your body's, like, "Yeah, bring it on, bring it on, bring it on." So you're eating twice as much as you normally would, whereas if you just had a regular orange or something naturally sweet, your body says, "Oh, I have enough calories from it. I can stop eating. I'm full." Your body actually doesn't know when it's full. So it keeps continuing to eat so you double it. It also is a filler so that you don't get hungry or thirsty because what's happening is your body says, "Ooh, I've got some kind of liquid in me. What are we doing? What are we doing?" Nothing. It sets you up for rollercoasters of highs and lows because you get that sugar -- that empty sugar -- high and then when you go to crash, instead of eating something good for you, you think, "I just need another high." It's kind of addictive. It's, like, heroin in the sense that your body's system doesn't know how to suffice on its own. So what it's always doing is telling you, "You need more, you need more, you need more." So what happens is it basically tricks your body into thinking it's not getting as many calories as it needs. It's stripping you of all your natural nutrients for anything you do eat, so if you eat an apple or you're eating an whole wheat carbohydrate, it's actually taking away from the good foods that you're eating."