[escapee]

I've found lately that I like other things diluted with water -- juice, Gatorade in summer, iced tea.

Congrats in making the change, but beware of other "natural" sweeteners like fructose, HFCS or sucrose on canned fruit juice and pre sweetened ice tea . There are equally bad though not the level of soda.

In medicine, the first alarms about the link between sugar consumption and heart disease were sounded by Yudkin in the late 1960s. At the time, he was chairman of the department of nutrition at Queen Elizabeth College, London. Disturbed by inconsistencies in the evidence linking animal fats to heart disease, Yudkin began searching for another dietary factor.


An expert in carbohydrate metabolism, he initially focused on sucrose consumption. In laboratory and human tests, he found that sucrose increased blood levels of cholesterol, triglyceride, uric acid, insulin, and cortisol - all associated with an increased risk of heart disease. Sucrose also raised blood pressure and increased the fragility of blood platelet cells, making them more prone to clotting.


As dramatic as those findings were, the real surprise came when Yudkin substituted fructose for sucrose in his experiments. "The effects of eating sucrose in the quantities we eat are magnified with fructose. Fructose is the dangerous part," he said. In contrast, glucose did little more than cause cavities.

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