If you think about it, soft drinks go well as a pair for different types of food (ah, the famous durian and coke combination) in Singapore. This is mainly the reason why so many of us like to have soft drinks. But, if you look at the numbers, there’s actually a lot of reasons NOT to drink soft drinks. Aside from them having no nutritional value at all, here are some other reasons why you’d want to abstain from drinking soft drinks from now on.

1. Soft drinks significantly contribute to weight gain
Simply put, because the sugar content of soft drinks can get pretty high, they can add more calories to your intake. Furthermore, the sugar in soft drinks does not actually make you feel more full. Do you notice how when you burp after drinking a can of coke, for example, your stomach gets lighter and you feel like you can eat more. And because they don’t make you feel full, you’re just adding more and more calories in your body without noticing.

2. May increase the risk of heart disease
Too much sugar intake has been found to increase the risks of heart diseases. It has already been established that high sugar intake is strongly linked to heart disease because of metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome, basically, are conditions that can generally lead to heart attack or other cardiovascular diseases caused by insulin resistance, hypertension, and etc.

3. Can also cause damage to your liver
There are mainly two types of sugar that we consume – glucose and fructose. Glucose is a type of sugar that is easily metabolized by the cells in our body. Fructose, on the other hand, is handled by only one organ and that is the liver. A can of Coke is actually known to contain an excessive amount of fructose. If you drink too much, your liver will not have enough time to metabolize everything which causes it to turn the excess fructose into fat. If this goes on for a long time, it will eventually lead to liver or even kidney disease.

4. Also causes tooth decay
When bacteria enters the mouth and ends up combined with the excess sugar left by soft drinks, they might produce certain acids that can weaken or even destroy your teeth. That then leads to the build-up of plaque on the teeth and eventually causes tooth decay. This reaction can last for 20 minutes so if you’re constantly drinking, you’re extensively causing damage to your teeth.

Of course, it is not necessary for us to completely remove sugar from our diet. It is much better to consume fruits and vegetables to obtain the essential types of sugar that our body really needs. The sugar we get from soft drinks are excessive and don’t really have nutrients so we should consider drinking moderately or even completely cutting them from our diet.