Cola Consumption Can Lead To Muscle Problems 420
wjousts writes "As I'm sure many Slashdot readers live almost exclusively on cola drinks, a new warning from doctors:
'Doctors have issued a warning about excessive cola consumption after noticing an increase in the number of patients suffering from muscle problems, according to the June issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice. ... 'Evidence is increasing to suggest that excessive cola consumption can also lead to hypokalaemia, in which the blood potassium levels fall, causing an adverse effect on vital muscle functions.' And sorry, diet colas aren't any better."
Re:Shit (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Shit (Score:3, Informative)
From TFA: The case studies looked at patients whose consumption ranged from two to nine litres of cola a day.
I'm good. :-)
Re:Cool story bro (Score:5, Informative)
It appears that hypokalaemia can be caused by excessive consumption of three of the most common ingredients in cola drinks â" glucose, fructose and caffeine.
So first off, Yes, Diet makes a difference- lacking two of the ingredients. And Diet Caffeine free is just fine. Additionally, these three inrgedients are not cola exclusive. Coffee (from dunks with liquid sugar), Root Beer, and other drinks, I'm sure, could find yourself in the same dillema.
I'm annoyed at this doomsday article (not just TFS, but TFA) which is totally shock value, and one paragraph of truth.
But then again, I suppose I should get used to that.
Re:Go figure (Score:0, Informative)
I think Mythbusters disproved that one a few seasons ago. (also disproved dissolving a nail)
Re:Not gonna help you, bro (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, a very very slow bullet.
I'm not sure what a "showel" is, but: There is no convincing evidence that moderate consumption of aspartame causes harm. The evidence was all from "accelerated failure studies", where they gave mice extreme doses and extrapolated back to normal consumption. Well, that's not bad for a first approximation, and diet drinks had a cancer warning label for a while. However, the studies were refuted early on and now time has borne out that the studies were incorrect. There's apparently a threshold effect, and under a certain dosage (which is quite high), it's perfectly safe.
If you want to worry about something, worry about brominated vegetable oil [wikipedia.org], which is used in Mt. Dew and other citrus sodas to disperse the citrus oils uniformly in the drink. Or, if you really want to worry about something which actually has a non-negligible chance of killing/disabling you, look both ways before crossing the street and always wear your seatbelt; and (a distant second) don't smoke.
What part of cola? (Score:3, Informative)
So what ingredient of cola does this? Last I read most popular cola drinks like Coke and Pepsi are nothing more than sugar, water, cinnamon, vanilla and phosphoric acid. Most cola drinks do not even have kola nut ingredients in them.
On thing is sure I stopped drinking the stuff regularly when I went to the dentist and had eleven cavities. Yes I brush twice a day and use the water pick. The trick is to rinse your mouth out after drinking very acidic and sugary drinks. As soon as you drink the acid begins to attack your enamel so after your done with a soda rinse your mouth out thoroughly with water. The few hours between drinking an acidic drink and brushing is more than enough time for acids to attack your teeth. This is what my dentist told me as he was drilling, not fun.
Re:Cool story bro (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This stuff is b-a-n-a-n-a-s (Score:5, Informative)
Please note the "excessive" volumes referred to in TFA are on the order of 4+ (or up to 10+) L per day. That's like 2+ to 5+ pots of strong coffee a day in terms of caffeine content.
This is probably exacerbated by the "flushing" of electrolytes via diarrhea caused by high-volume fructose consumption.
Please. Know what you're talking about, or at least RTFA, before you try to make a counter-argument.
Overhydration can cause hypokalemia via excess elimination as well, but that becomes a problem long after hyponatremia becomes a severe problem.
Re:Shit (Score:3, Informative)
The interesting thing about the cola problem is that the hypokalemia is more severe than the hyponatremia, suggesting that there is an additional factor other than overhydration.
Best guess is caffeine, as per the article. It's already well documented that high doses of caffeine cause hypokalemia, even when the caffeine is administered in pill form without abnormal amounts of water.
Re:Cool story bro (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20050613/drink-more-diet-soda-gain-more-weight [webmd.com]
Acids! Phosphoric acid and carbonic acid. (Score:1, Informative)
Are not good for your teeth and bones, drinking tons will probably screw up your whole body's PH levels having all kinds of ill effects.
Re:Cool story bro (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I know the migraines are easily reproducible for me. When I didn't know what the cause was, I was really confused. I'd drink whatever was put in front of me. Now, I don't drink diet sodas or tequila. Anything else is fair game. :)
I did sample testing, but I've also accidentally fallen into blind tests. I've gone to friends house, and they've poured me a drink. I didn't know until my head hurt, so I'd ask "was that a diet drink?" Nothing else that I've ever consumed has ever given me a headache quickly. Alcohol does it too, but that's usually from over consumption, and the headache comes later. :) That's easily mitigated by the consumption of large quantities of fluids before the headache comes on.
Re:Cool story bro (Score:3, Informative)
From the link "Fowler is quick to note that a study of this kind does not prove that diet soda causes obesity. More likely, she says, it shows that something linked to diet soda drinking is also linked to obesity." Correlation. Causation. Has Slashdot not gotten the hang of this yet?
Re:Shit (Score:5, Informative)
The US-RDA for water is 2 liters of water (8 cups) per day.
[Citation needed]
There is explicitly no RDA for water. The DRI or AI for water [usda.gov] is between 2.7-3.7 liters per day, but "includes all water contained in food, beverages, and drinking water." Those references also note that "Thirst and consumption of beverages at meals are adequate to maintain hydration." -- I.e. no need to carry a bottle to constantly sip from as if you're trying to survive a desert hike, on top of every other beverage you're already drinking.
The 64 oz / day myth was created by people who can't read both consecutive sentences from the 1945 Food & Nutrition Board study: "An ordinary standard for diverse persons is 1 milliliter for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods." Well established. [wikipedia.org] The most recent recommendation from the same board suggests approximately 3 liters of water, about-faces itself saying most (80%) is met through beverages, explicitly denotes caffeinated beverages as an acceptable source of hydration, and similarly reiterates that the "vast majority" of people meet their hydration need merely by responding to thirst - not by forcing themselves to drink water to hit a magic number.
Yes, what's all this about "Cola"? (Score:3, Informative)
If it doesn't have Kola Nut [wikipedia.org], it's not a Kola, or a Cola. Do they mean to say "carbonated beverages"?
Caffeine and Cola (Score:2, Informative)
The caffeine levels in Coke or Pepsi are very low compared to coffee; approximately 10%.
Canada Health recommends no more than 400 mg of caffeine a day. To exceed this, you'd have to drink 12 L of Coke. On the other hand, only two extra large Double Doubles will bring you to that limit.
18% of all Canadian aged 31 through 50 exceed this limit, and it's not from drinking cola. The typical Canadian coffee drinker aged 31 through 50 averages over 600 mg a day.[1] [statcan.gc.ca]
Re:Bananas (Score:3, Informative)
Check it out [usda.gov] and notice how far down on the list Bananas are for potassium content.
One cup of tomato paste (granted, it's concentrated) has roughly 5 times the potassium content that a cup of banana does. A baked potato has just about double a banana, and a 1/2 filet of halibut has not quite double. More reasonable tomato sauces also double the potassium content of bananas. A nice meal of filet of halibut and baked potato is worth 4-6 bananas, depending on if you go for the full or just half filet.
So, if you're going to drink 9 liters of cola per day, just be sure you also get the super-sized french fries when you go through the drive-through, that has about as much potassium as about 4 bananas!! (assuming 2 cups, which seems about right to me, probably on the low side)
I don't want a large Farva! I want a liter-a-cola!
Re:Cool story bro (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cool story bro (Score:2, Informative)
And it tastes really bad.
God damn, not this shit again. How do you tell people what they think tastes good and tastes bad? It's all up to the individual. I can't stand the taste of beer, any beer and I've tried my fair share, yet that's an absolutely huge industry so surely there are just a lot of people out there that just have bad taste right?
Your assumption that "diet" soda helps with obesity is statistically false
Can you find an article that proves this point? I switched from real coke to Coke Zero and lost a few kg's in weeks, just because I cut the sugar out. I've come across a fair few people that experienced the same. These days I watch my diet pretty strictly, which is what you do when you start looking at promo work, and it does come down to moderation and calorie control but cutting out just under 200kcal per can of coke and having coke zero for the caffiene hit becomes quite the saving. 1lb of fat can be lost by cutting out 3000kcal so don't have 3cans of coke a day but try something diet and you'll save that per week.
And yes, everyones body is different in how it burns but to say that people cutting the sugary shit out of their drinks is statistically false needs citing.
Re:Cool story bro (Score:4, Informative)
Little difference between orange juice and cola, really. If you like one over the other fine, but it's close to a wash nutritionally.
Not true; for instance, orange juice contains potassium:
see here [findarticles.com]
('...One eight-ounce glass of orange juice contains 450 milligrams of potassium, the same as an average banana....')
Re:Shit (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cool story bro (Score:4, Informative)
>> Little difference between orange juice and cola, really. If you like one over the other fine, but it's close to a wash nutritionally
Not really. Cola is sugar water with nothing of nutritional value besides that. Orange juice (the real stuff) has a lot of vitamins and minerals in it that your body makes use of. Sugar content is also high, but that's not the only factor.
Re:Not gonna help you, bro (Score:1, Informative)
Almost 30 years later, epidemiological data shows A. a massive increase in brain tumers; B. nothing; or C. ?
BTW: Absence of proof of safety is not proof of harm.
oh noes (Score:5, Informative)
Gee, this is hardly surprising. Who'd have thought that over-indulgence of soft drinks (or 'adult' drinks like beer and liquor) would result in physical problems?
With soda/cola/pop/whatever, you are consuming a supersaturate. There is a shitload of sugar in there, and its consumption will dehydrate you. And it's not all that good for the ol' pancreas, either.
Diet sodas are also a problem, as they have aspartame in them. Aspartame is a mild neurotoxin. No, you won't get dehydrated and get muscle fatigue that way, but you sure as hell will cause problems down the line. Some people who are highly environmentally sensitive will have an allergic/asthmatic reaction to the stuff.
Not THAT old canard again... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cool story bro (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry this will be a little long, but I promise it's good:
So you feed your lab rats a fair number of their calories via yogurt (because it's easy to tamper with). They do reasonably well on this diet, and they don't overeat compared to their activity level -- they stay a reasonable weight. Now you leave half the rats on the regular yogurt diet, and switch the other half to part regular, and part yogurt that has artificial sweetener instead of sugar. You don't let them overeat for now. After a while, you switch group B back to only yogurt with real sugar in it. And their weight takes off! What happened?
The trick is that animals have an innate sense of how many calories they are eating, partly based on how sweet the food is. But this sense is apparently not fixed, it is possible to mess with it. And break it. The rats who had taken on what tasted like lots of calories but turned out to be very few, had their calorie sensors broken because "sweet" was no longer an accurate way to measure. So now they happily eat way to much sweet without the normal internal limits, and balloon up.
Same with humans, probably. Yeah, some people will get fat and get type 2 diabetes without the help, but folks who get fat and are told to get thin by any means "or else", well . . . they might switch to diet. And lose all possibility of self-limiting. As trimmer and trimmer people are told that they are too fat (doctors have been lowering the range of "normal" for a while now), more and more people will fall into the break-your-calorie-sensor trap that is artificial sweetening.
I suspect that there will be a slight evolutionary trend toward people who think that artificial sweeteners taste nasty (yes, some components of ability to taste are genetic, and a bunch more come via the nurture route -- also usually from one's parents).
Re:Cola specific? (Score:3, Informative)
Cola is significantly worse than water because:
1) Simple sugars (glucose, fructose) significantly enhance electrolyte absorption and reabsorption. The later is important, because in your kidneys, this means more electrolytes excreted.
2) Caffeine is a diuretic, and increases glomerular filtration rate, leading to more fluid and electrolyte excretion.
3) Cola is very acidic (eg 2.6 pH). This strips out cations (sodium, potassium, calcium) and increased levels of anions (citrate, chloride, carbonate).
The three of these working together simultaneously dramatically increases the amount of electrolytes removed from the body, and does so fairly quickly since they are absorbed quickly (due to the sugars).
Re:Cool story bro (Score:3, Informative)
Nutrasweet can actually be broken down by the body, and a teaspoon of it actually has one calorie more than a teaspoon of sugar.
Artificial sweeteners aren't used because they aren't absorbed, they're used because they're so much sweeter than regular sugar, that you can use far less of them, and thus end up with far less calories.
Re:Cool story bro (Score:2, Informative)
Here is a study which shows the correlation with diet soda and weight gain.
http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20050613/drink-more-diet-soda-gain-more-weight [webmd.com]
Yes, this does imply causation,
But I know of no study that shows that switching to diet soda leads to weight loss.
Do you know of any?
Your single data point has little meaning.
The Fear Culture (Score:2, Informative)
Beware the soda drink epidemic that is paralyzing our muscles while the swine-flu pandemic threat is at level-5, terrorists are playing in your backyard, child abductors and serial killers are lurking right outside your home , the Iranian nuclear threat is coming to a theater near you, and global warming is killing the planet.
Let us know if we left out anything, we will be more than happy to give you a reason to fear those too.
Re:Cool story bro (Score:3, Informative)
Try knowing what you are talking about before you comment. First result for "taste in the gut" gives you this [aspetjournals.org]:
Taste receptors, the taste G-protein gustducin, and downstream signaling elements known to underlie the detection and transduction of bitter, sweet, and umami (monosodium glutamateâ"containing) compounds in taste buds of the tongue are present also in specific endocrine cells of the gut: the enteroendocrine K and L cells. Glucose in the gut activates sweet taste receptors and gustducin present in the intestineâ(TM)s enteroendocrine L cells, leading to secretion of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) from these cells. GLP-1 and glucose-dependent insulinotropic peptide (GIP) are incretin hormones, which augment insulin release from the beta cells of the pancreas. GLP-1, GIP, and other gut hormones released from the K and L cells affect insulin secretion, glucose homeostasis, nutrient absorption and other gut functions. Glucose transport into enterocytes via Na+,glucose cotransporter 1 (SGLT1) and GLUT2 appears to be regulated by the gustducin- and sweet receptor-expressing enteroendocrine cells. In response to sugar ingestion, knockout mice lacking gustducin show deficits in the release of GLP-1 and insulin, in glucose homeostasis, and in upregulation of SGLT1. Apparently, the gut "tastes" sugars and sweeteners in much the same way as does the tongue and by using many of the same signaling elements. Taste receptors and other taste signaling elements in gut may be contributors to obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and other diet-related disorders. Gut-expressed taste elements are attractive targets for therapeutic intervention.
The same sweetners that fool your sweet receptors on your tongue fool the sweet receptors in you gut messing with you insulin release amongst other things. We had a professor from OSU give a talk about it a few months ago.
Heres another link from the Royal Society of Chemistry [rsc.org]:
A sugar-sensing receptor in the intestine could explain why drinking diet cola may hinder obese people who hope to lose weight1,2 and lead to new ways of treating obesity and diabetes.
This explains why humans and animals fail to lose weight with low-calorie artificial sweeteners: they stimulate increased glucose absorption from carbohydrate breakdown in the gut,' said Soraya Shirazi-Beechey, who led the Liverpool team.