The Truth About Fizzy Drinks: Sugar, Sweeteners & Smarter Choices for Your Health

When it comes to fluids, try and keep it as simple as possible. Drink water, sparking water, tea and coffee and then be mindful of everything else.

Here are a few pages from the book The Fibre First Diet by our founder Steve Bennett,

“Let's break down the fizzy drink dilemma into something more tangible – teaspoons. According to the folks at CokeTM, they're selling about 1.9 billion beverages daily. For simplicity, let's pretend every one of those is your standard 330 ml can. Sure, in the real world, some of these are those tiny cans you nab on flights, and others are the hefty 1.5-litre bottles meant for sharing (or not), but let's keep things straightforward. Each of these imaginary cans is brimming with 35 g sugar. That translates to about 8.75 teaspoons of sugar per can. But let's round down to 8 teaspoons to keep our math neat and tidy. Coke also sometime back shared that 43% of its cola sales are the sugar-free or reduced-sugar varieties like Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, Diet Coke, or Coca-Cola Life. This titbit suggests a shift towards more health-conscious choices, but it still leaves us with a whopping 57% clinging to the classic, sugary formula. What does this mean in the grand scheme of global sugar consumption? An astronomical sum of over a billion cans (1,080,000,000 to be precise) guzzled daily, contributing to a daily dose of 8.6 billion sugar cubes...