Soda, it doesn't do a body good

A little over a year ago I gave up drinking soda. At the time I didn’t really have a reason to give it up, I was just copying my older brother because I admire him and want to be like him. When the summer ended, however, I had to decide what it was that I didn’t like about soda, because if I gave up all soda and soda-like products I would be able to drink milk, water, kool-aid, and coffee. Now only one of those choices contains caffeine so I sat down and thought about what it was in soda that made it unhealthy. I came to the conclusion that the main ingredients in soda that I object to are caramel coloring and high fructose corn syrup. Caramel coloring has been known to cause kidney stones because it builds up in your kidneys and it takes a lot of water to wash it away. High fructose corn syrup has more serious side effects.
I researched it on the internet (not terribly reliable, I know) and found a study done with rats. In the study, the rats were fed a diet high in sucrose and low in copper. This caused the rats to have internal organ failure. Now as all chemistry students know (or will learn) sucrose is made of glucose and fructose. So the scientists did a second study where 1 group of rats had a diet high in fructose and low in copper, 1 group had a diet high in glucose and low in copper, 1 group had a diet with average sugars and low copper, and 1 group was fed a balanced diet, for control. Only the group high in fructose suffered the same internal organ problems as the first test. Now you may have noticed that all of these tests were conducted with diets low in copper. This is still comparable to human diets because most Americans have diets low in copper.
Now, high fructose corn syrup would not be so much of a problem if it wasn’t in just about every commercial drink and a lot of commercial foods. It is cheap to make and so it is used as a sweetener in many processes. Take a look sometime and see how much of your food has this ingredient. It may surprise you.
In case you are wondering, I did find an acceptable caffeinated drink for myself. Monster energy drink. It tastes good because citric acid is like the 3^rd ingredient on the list and it is sweetened with glucose. I keep my consumption to 1 a day (or less) though, because it is an energy drink and you never really know what too much of that stuff will do to you.