It’s in millions of cupboards and fridges all over the country.
A heart surgeon has described one of the world’s most common drinks as “liquid death” and told people they should not drink it “period”. Dr Jeremy London is board-certified in general surgery, vascular surgery and thoracic surgery, and regularly posts advice on social media and in interviews. And he’s not the only one warning of how bad soft drinks are for your health.
In an Instagram post, Dr London listed “four things I absolutely avoid as a heart surgeon”. They were smoking, alcohol, breads and pastas, and soft drinks. He said: “Number one, smoking: no question the single worst thing you can do for your entire body. Destroys your lungs, causes lung cancer, high cardiovascular risks, heart attacks and strokes, don’t smoke.”
Second on his list was alcohol. He said: “Hate to break it to you [but it’s] toxic. Toxic to every cell in your body. Your body, your rules, you decide for yourself. For me personally removing alcohol from my life has probably been one of the most transformative decisions I’ve made as an adult.”
Next on his list was soft drinks. He said: “Liquid death. Just don’t drink them. Period. Done.”
Lastly, Dr London said: “Avoid breads and pastas. Avoid the refined flours and wheats. Eighty per cent of weight control is diet, 20% is exercise. I guarantee you can out-eat any exercise that you do.”
In a later interview with Today, Dr London doubled down on his views on soft drinks: “I think that soft drinks are just a scourge in our society, and so I was really trying to get some attention. Obviously, high-calorie soft drinks and ingesting a lot of calories that people don’t realise they’re getting with the sugar-based soft drinks is a big no-no.”
And he’s not the only world-leading doctor convinced soft drinks are worse for health than most people realise. Dr WIlliam Li told the Zoe podcast recently: “Soda is everyone’s favourite whipping boy. Rightfully so. The preponderance of clinical evidence, public health evidence, shows that high consumption of soda is associated with everything from metabolic disease to cardiovascular disease to cancer risk.
“But is it the sugar? Is glucose that demonic element that we need to crucify? Answer’s no. Soda is not just water, otherwise that’d be just carbonated water. But soda itself has all these additives, colours, flavourings, preservatives, stabilisers… that is accumulated exposure to toxins. It’s not one exposure, it’s the chronic exposure over time.”
