The least healthy beverages
Before talking about the least healthy beverages it’s essential to understand the importance and impact of beverages in general on our health.
Our body is composed of around 70% of water and to keep that we daily need to drink plenty of water/beverages.
Alas, today, in most countries and parts of the world, the most commonly found beverages are mostly toxic beverages for human health.
Toxic beverages
These toxic beverages are real toxic bombs filled with synthetic sweeteners, flavors, colorings, and many more toxic ingredients. They harm your body in various ways and can be classified into 3 categories:
- Sodas and syrups
- Industrial or pasteurized fruit juices
- Alcoholic drinks
Sodas and Syrups
The biggest plague of toxic intake of substances, sodas, and syrups has flooded the market, replacing the classical “healthy” fruit juices.
Produced by agro-pharmaceutical industries, these toxic drinks are directly responsible for many lifestyle diseases that have skyrocketed in a couple of decades. Here are some examples:
- Diabetes
- Obesity
- Heart diseases
- White sugar addiction
- etc.
Most of the time, sodas are just water with dozens of additives such as colorants, flavorings, sweeteners and preservatives. Some labels are more reminiscent of science fiction than of a drink….
The majority of syrups have simply never contained a single fruit. Like soda, it’s a chemical soup made from water, with additives to thicken it. The price is unbeatable, and so is the health damage.
Industrial or pasteurized fruit juices
The idea of introducing fruit juices as daily beverages is a consequence of the ultracarnished, industrialized diet that was gradually introduced in the United States in the post-World War 2 period.
Highly deficient in vitamin C, this unbalanced diet has led to an explosion in cardiovascular disease. Fruit juices, sold as healthy and full of vitamins, have in turn invaded the market.
In fact, this has enabled multinational food companies to sell millions of tonnes of poor-quality fruit, transformed into concentrates, making them easier to preserve and transport. Almost all industrial fruit juices are made from these concentrates.
Concentrates are fruit juices that have been concentrated (part of the water in the juice is removed) and pasteurized (subjected to 80° for around 30 seconds), meaning that heat-sensitive vitamins and antioxidants are completely destroyed.
To make them taste better and store them longer, these concentrates can be enhanced with all kinds of additives, such as flavorings, preservatives, colorants (to make this shiny orange color of the orange juice!), sugars and other substances.
This concentrate can be stored for a long time (more than a year!). To make the final fruit juice, the manufacturer simply takes this concentrate, adds water to it, and puts it in attractive packaging on supermarket shelves.
But it gets worse. A drink called fruit juice may simply be a soda… many people confuse the two.
Alcoholic drinks
Unfortunately, alcoholic beverages are second only to sodas in terms of popularity, so what better way than to sell…alcoholic sodas!
Young people crave these drinks, which have the added advantage of getting consumers hooked on them, as well as getting them used to regular alcohol consumption. Consumed cold, these sugary drinks are all the rage, and their consumption continues to rise, to the great misfortune of young people.
Culturally, alcohol consumption is sacralized in all countries with a great oenological culture. Even the best wine contains nothing exceptional, nothing that can’t be found in fruit or fermented beverages.
But despite the 12% average alcohol content, wine was considered therapeutic by the most extreme consumers.
We say “was” because for years it has been coming down from the pedestal on which it was unjustly placed.
For pregnant women, tolerance to alcoholic beverages is…zero. It took generations of children sacrificed before the neurological and developmental disorders caused by even modest alcohol consumption were finally recognized.
While it’s true that a healthy adult can tolerate a small, occasional dose of alcohol, this is not the case for regular consumption, to which the majority of the population, especially young people, are exposed.
We’re not even talking about strong spirits consumed directly or combined with cocktails or other drinks.
The image people have of alcohol abuse is that of caricatured alcoholism, whereas social alcoholism is much more widespread. The phenomenon of tolerance (the body is better able to tolerate alcohol and increasingly higher doses when it is consumed regularly) has a lot to do with it.
Is there a solution? Yes, and it’s simple: don’t drink alcoholic beverages!
And if you absolutely want it… only on rare occasions (2-3 x a year), which will prevent addiction and the trap of social drinking!
Get help with your health issues
Least healthy beverages
The least healthy beverages are different from toxic drinks. They are not industrial but organic, yet they should be consumed only in small quantities and are not recommended for two significant reasons:
- High sugar content
- Undergone treatment
Always choose fruit over fruit juice, even organic. Fermented beverages and cold teas, even wholegrain organic ones, contain significant amounts of sugar, and should only be consumed occasionally.
High sugar content
To replace sodas, finally recognized as unhealthy, organic drinks made from teas, flowers or cold herbal teas have proliferated on supermarket shelves.
With no additives, coloring or flavoring, they nonetheless contain too much sugar. They should therefore be eaten only occasionally.
Undergone treatment
Beverages made from cacao, chicory or cereals can be of average quality, containing white sugar and other additives such as the widespread “vanillin” flavoring. In addition, emulsifiers such as soy or sunflower lecithin (GMO) can be used to make the drink more homogeneous.
On the other hand, in the same categories you’ll find 100% healthy drinks made with pure organic cacao, coconut sugar and superfoods like maca.
The fact remains, however, that organic grain coffee is made from roasted cereals, so we have the same problems as with coffee roasting.
Most consumed least healthy beverages
Two beverages are strikingly ahead of all others: black tea and coffee.
The consumption of tea and coffee is virtually universal. Along with black tea, coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to find people whose only beverage of the day is… cups of coffee. Let’s not forget that coffee doesn’t quench thirst; on the contrary, it dehydrates and cuts off the sensation of thirst.
But what do most people actually consume?
For tea, it’s often powdered in bags, tasteless, full of pesticides, and sometimes with flavorings and colorings.
Cheap, these teas can be bought in maxi tins for a ridiculous price. And then there are the teas from automatic machines with an equally chemical lemon taste. When a beverage becomes as popular as tea, quality can’t keep up with demand, and mediocrity inevitably invades the market.
With coffee, the problem is the same, if not worse.
Blends of freeze-dried coffees or brand-name coffees can, with robusta, pesticides and a roasting process that defies all competition, end up giving you gastritis or, on the contrary, being so tasteless that they act like a sleeping pill. The cursor can vary from one to the other, depending on the brand and the country.
As for coffee capsules, which don’t contain coffee…but chemical substitutes with artificial flavoring, many people would be surprised to discover what they’re consuming under the guise of convenience.
High-quality organic coffee and tea are expensive, and few people can afford them on a daily basis. Nonetheless, we recommend you be uncompromising about the quality as your health depends on it.
The coffee
The real problem with coffee is roasting, which leads to the formation of undesirable molecules that are harmful to our bodies. Among other things, this leads to the formation of AGEs (Advanced Glycation End products), also known as Maillard molecules (glycation of proteins with sugars) and acrylamide (found in roasted foods such as French fries).
So roasting coffee, however gently, poses a problem. Glycation promotes the aging of our tissues, and the acids contained in coffee strongly acidify the body.
Therefore, don’t drink coffee if you’re not used to it, otherwise only pure Arabica in moderation. In addition, choose filtered coffee, as the filter retains a large proportion of two molecules that are problematic for your blood vessels (cafestol and kahweol).
The tea
Black tea is oxidized and fermented. When heated, it loses some of its antioxidants, which is why green tea is preferred. Black tea is consumed for its taste and aroma and, like coffee, for its stimulating effect, as it contains alkaloids such as caffeine, theobromine, and theophylline.
These psychostimulant alkaloids are also found in coffee, cacao, guarana, mate and kola nuts.
Black tea is interesting for its polyphenols, such as flavonoids, which are important antioxidants. It also contains vitamins and minerals, in varying quantities depending on the tea, as well as tannins which can reduce absorption. Consuming several cups of black tea a day can therefore be problematic for some people.
The solution? Vary your beverage intake, and take the opportunity to drink exceptional teas in moderation.
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