Fighting the Sugar and Soda Battle to Stay Fit
Nutrition and what we drink

This entry isn’t directly about underwear but it’s about staying healthy and that certainly has to do with looking good in your underwear. If you haven’t yet checked out the current issue of Scientific American Magazine titled: Feast and Famine consider picking it up. It’s a great double-issue all about food, culture and nutritional health in the world. There are a series of well-written and researched articles on nutrition and the worldwide obesity epidemic which has been mostly silently growing more and more urgent. One of the interesting highlights from the articles was how much what we drink has contributed to poor health and nutrition around the globe. Typical soda is loaded with sugars derived from high-fructose corn syrup which is particularly bad to consume in large volumes.

It’s ironic that soda ads almost exclusively feature models or celebrities in muscle-chiseled perfect health like the Diet Coke Ads from the 90s. Remember Lucky Vanous as the construction break guy in those TV ads? In reality he’d be in pretty bad shape if he drank the amounts of soda that many school-age children now consume on a daily basis due to easy availability and billions of dollars spent on marketing. I don’t mean to pick on soda companies, they have a right to produce and sell their products like anyone else but I do fault schools that make soda too easy a choice over better, healthier alternatives. Adult workplaces are just as bad. Past workplaces and my current one feature plenty of free soda for the employees. In fact where I work you can take advantage of no less than 8 different sugary sodas in nearly unlimited quantities. The so-called “healthy” alternatives are fruit juice cocktails and here’s the rub, if you look at the nutrition information on those juice bottles you’ll find that they have more sugar in them than the sodas! It’s truly ridiculous that even orange juice, in a small-serving bottle, can be loaded with 47grams of sugar. There are some small positive steps being made towards reducing the emphasis of soda and unhealthy foods in schools and workplaces but I think there’s definitely much more than could be done in both larger spaces in terms of political and business policies and smaller spaces like daily individual choices.

One thing I like to do given that I don’t always feel like drinking water (which is of course the best choice) is to take those surgary juice drinks and cut them in half with bottled water. That way at the very least I’m consuming less sugar (1 juice drink serving instead of 2 or 3) in a day and more regular water. Other times it’s just a matter of will power to not be tempted since I admit sometimes I really would like to try a root beer or sprite (I used to drink a lot of sodas). I think what helps me to avoid sodas is to keep myself educated and well-armed with information like the articles from the Scientific American Magazine. Ultimately we have choices and it’s about exercising the right ones so hopefully through better knowledge and awareness we’ll help reverse the current unhealthy trends that modern society is marching towards.