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The effects soda has on the body are numerous. A good place to begin exploring this numerousness is with the amount of sugar found in a single twelve ounce can of soda.

Ten teaspoons of sugar is the recommended daily allotment (RDA) the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has suggested for a 2,000 calorie diet. Yet soda manufacturers frequently meet or exceed this allotment by adding ten to twelve teaspoons of sugar to each of their non diet cans of drink. This means that each time a consumer drinks one lousy non diet soft drink that consumer takes in at least and possibly more than the RDA for single day's worth of sugar.

Although sugar information listed on soda cans is provided in the form of grams, consumers can easily determine how much sugar they're consuming from canned soft drinks by dividing the number of grams on the can by four. Four grams of sugar is the same as one teaspoon of sugar. Therefore if a can contains forty grams of sugar - forty divided by four equals ten - the can contains ten teaspoons of sugar. When considering the number of teaspoons of sugar consumers digest on a daily basis that are added to other food sources they eat or drink it's easy to see how one can exceed the RDA sugar recommendation without even realizing it.

Large amounts of sugar found in sodas are only the beginning of the sugary dilemma. Another side of the sugary predicament has to do with what kind of sugar we're talking about. Prior to the 1980's refined cane sugar or pure corn syrup were primary ingredients manufactures used to sweeten sodas. This was great because these sugar forms provided glucose to sodas; and glucose is useful to the body as an immediate energy source that's stored in the liver and released as insulin when we need it.

Today's manufacturers have put glucose aside and inserted fructose in its place as the preferred non diet soda sweetener. But we're not simply talking fructose - we're talking high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) - and manufacturers use it because it is more cost efficient - for them - than cane sugar and pure corn syrup. The big dilemma is that HFCS has been criticized for promoting hypertension, diabetes, and hyperactivity along with a slew of other health conditions.

HFCS come to be when corn syrups are put through enzymatic processes to raise the levels of fructose in a sweetener. Once the high fructose levels are attained, the modified sweetener is added to pure corn syrup (100 % glucose) in varying degrees, to reach its

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