Drinking ourselves to death

Put down the soda. Drop the deadly weapon!
A coroner in New Zealand has recently discovered that Coke can kill.

After a three year investigation into the death of a 31-year-old mother of eight, a coroner provided evidence that her love of soda and uncontrollable habit of drinking it ended her life.  
The young mother, Natasha Harris, was drinking up to two gallons of Coke a day. She died of a heart attack due to the amount of caffeine within her system and an enlarged liver filled with fat deposits from large amounts of excess sugar.  
Now most of you can read this and say that she obviously had a very bad diet and lifestyle.

I agree that drinking even a gallon of soda is extremely bad for your diet.

However here in America this lifestyle is on the rise and doctors are seeing a dramatic rise in addiction to this tasty killer.

Like any narcotic or alcoholic drink, sodas are extremely addictive. Due to the caffeine, artificial sweeteners and sodium it’s hard to find which, if not all three, people are becoming addicted to.

“Soda consumption has more than quadrupled in the last 40 years” an article on ediets.com stated.  
The average American is drinking five cans of soda a day.

People are replacing water with soda, and by doing so they are causing their bodies to go into dehydration stages.

Approximately 73 percent of all Americans are chronically dehydrated.

Ever wonder why you have a headache that just won’t go away?
You take some Advil and wash it down with a sip of water and hope it gets better?
Headaches are often caused by dehydration and when taking medicine to rid you of a nasty headache it’s prescribed to drink many glasses of water to help move it along.  
That headache is your body’s way of saying “Hey, drink water please!” because when you get down to 20 percent dehydration your body can shut down into a coma, and if it gets bad enough you can even die.

As Americans we need to be taking proactive steps to solve this problem.

Just as we know cigarettes are bad for our health and cause cancer we are still smoking them.

Everyone should now know that sodas are unhealthy, but people still drink them daily. We buy them in 24 packs and give them to our children after school.

A progressive step occurred when Arkansas passed a law to keep soda machines out of schools, knowing that it is healthier for students to be drinking water or juice.

As college students we are even more susceptible to the negative effects of soda so we should be ever conscious of our consumption.

While we are old enough to understand the health risks involved with drinking soda we can still find ourselves drinking it on a regular basis.

We try to stay up late by drinking caffeine to finish homework and we go to the caf and can drink as many sodas as we want. Most people will say that banning Coke machines on school campuses is ridiculous.

However I have barely covered the surface of what consuming sodas does to our bodies.

Will Americans be able to rid themselves of bad drinking habits without taking such a serious step?


Lakin Cathey is a freshman business major of Heber Springs.