Our goal is to provide you with the best possible healthy lifestyle tips so it is inevitable that we would cover one of America’s most discrete contributors to obesity: sugary drinks. Maybe you know they’re bad and it’s a treat – or maybe you really had no idea just how terrible these drinks can be for your body. If your body is a temple, these would be the graffiti you vandalize it with. You’ll notice the common theme throughout this article is sugar. The scariest part is many people don’t think about what they drink even if they are conscious about their food choices. In some of these cases, your drink will pack on more pounds than your meal! So let’s not waste any more time, here are the first six drinks you need to avoid: 1. Juice Drinks Let’s clarify this now before we go any further – yes, fruit is good for you. Juice is good for you, but sugar (the refined, artificial, sucralose and fructose) is not. So fruit cocktails and punches that are packed full of all kinds of sugar are not healthy even though they may allude to being ‘full of vitamin C’ and offering ‘daily fruit servings’. Don’t fret, you can still find fantastic alternatives that really are the kind of wholesome goodness in juice that you’re looking for. Avoid concentrate, cocktails and added ingredients – stick to the good stuff. 2. Sports Drinks If you can’t pronounce it, you probably shouldn’t be drinking it – let alone stocking your fridge full and taking it along to the gym! If you’re going for one of the traditional options for a sports drink, they are packed full of either sugar or even worse, artificial sweeteners that are making your trips to the gym a waste. Instead find something that hydrates like coconut water or shake it up a little and give the ol’ H20 a try. 3. Frozen Coffees For those of you who didn’t know – or perhaps you just had an inkling, frozen coffee is a dessert in a cup…and usually a very large cup. It is not the right start to your day and will steadily pack the pounds on at upwards of 800 calories a cup. Having one as a treat every once and awhile is up to your discretion but a more appropriate daily substitute could be an iced Americano topped with skim milk with a little raw sugar, if you absolutely must. Coffee can be a tough habit to kick but you should seriously consider it for your health’s sake! 4. Diet Soda Let’s elaborate on the effects of artificial sweeteners, especially for those of you who believe that a diet pop is a much healthier choice. If you are going to treat yourself to a chemically packed, sodium filled, carbonate beverage – you might as well go for the sugar and try to limit it by watering it down with some carbonated water (an effective trick to wean yourself off). Diet sodas are packed with aspartame that slowly rots your insides and makes your body more vulnerable to various chronic illnesses over time. If you think it’s okay to chug down five cans of diet-soda in a day, you may want start to think about some alternatives. 5. Smoothie Chain Blended Drinks Again, fruit is good for you but who would realistically sit down and eat 2 bananas, 1 pack of blueberries, an entire mango, and half a pineapple as well as a scoop of frozen yogurt and some ‘juice’ and call it a breakfast? Blending it does not make it healthy. That itty-bitty booster that is supposed to give you ‘protein’ should be the benefit, not the added benefit. These smoothies tend to be packed with calories and sugar (even if it is natural) and leave you starving an hour after consuming them, even though they cost you more calories than a meal would have. Making smoothies yourself with the right ingredients to kick start your day is fine – but stop and take a look at what is really inside your Orange Julius. 6. Fast Food Smoothies While we’re on the subject of smoothies…the latest health craze of blending your breakfast has trickled down into the fast food chains offering a ‘healthy substitute’ for those of us who are dragged in with our loved ones and hoping to find a substitute we can tolerate. The nutritional value in the typical fast food smoothie is pure marketing. They use a combination of syrups similar in concept to a jelly or ice cream topping with real fruit, faux interpretations of fruit, sucralose, fructose and a whole lot of sugar, dye and preservatives whose names you probably can’t spell. Then they add in a little ‘fruit cocktail’ that we covered #1 and potentially add in ‘sugar-free yogurt’ (packed with aspartame) or 2% milk (packed full of fat). A disgustingly *sweet* start to your day! For more healthy lifestyle tips and the next 6 drinks you need to avoid, click here.Page 2
