People go to the gym to exercise. Some need to lose weight, others want to gain muscle. However, lots of them grumble that they can't lose weight and they work so hard but nothing changes. For example, a friend of mine who's following a hard diet and exercising every single day trying to lose some weight, loves soda. He is literally addicted to it. He can't eat without a can of soda in front of him. His excuse is "the food sticks to my throat if I don't drink a coke."  The problem is that he ends up eating a quarter of his dish and drinking two to three cans of sodas. And he always complains about not losing that much weigh. The majority of people ignore or don't know about the danger of the soft drinks.

Soft drinks in general are made of carbonated water, sugar, and caffeine. The differences between every soft drink are either the flavor or the amount of the three ingredients. Also, if they want to add an extra flavor, they include Acids. Those drinks are sweetened with different sweeteners. Sugar is the common sweetener, but now days, many soft drinks have high-fructose corn syrup instead of sugar. Diet soft drinks on the other hand use different low-calorie sweeteners, including aspartame, saccharin and, sucralose. Most countries these days don't use sugar as a sweetener in these drinks, but some still are. In fact, few American consumers are more likely to purchase a Coca-Cola from Mexico, for example, because it is made of sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. Other elements can be added to these drinks. Coloring assistants are used to make it look better. Some of these coloring assistance are not natural, while others are typical elements like the caramel, which gives brown color, or carotenoid that makes a yellow or orange color. Saponins could be added to soft drinks such as the cream soda to give them more foams. Few soft drinks consist of preservatives such as sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate that keeps the drinks from spoiling. However, all those things that soft drinks are made of would hurt the human health with the passage of time because it's all chemicals that do not benefit the body in anyway. Although soft drinks are virtually integrated in our daily lives - I believe they should be banned due the harm they cause to the human body, the unnecessary financial burden, and the obesity epidemic confronting America.

Obesity is a huge problem in the United States. It is affecting people's health badly, especially kids and teenagers. Over 50% of Americans are fat. Many doctors claim that the soft drinks should be controlled in schools in order to control weight disorders in the youth of the U.S. Some schools have responded by removing vending machines from schools. The US ministries of health, paid attention to the problem by giving a rule that suggests banning soft drinks, and ask pediatricians to try to help the society to find other ways to improve student's health (Hodge, Barraza, Russo, Nelson, & Measer, 2014). 

Addiction to soft drinks would make you lose your money exactly the same way as smokers do. Both of sweetened beverages and cigarettes cost money for nothing. In recent years, researchers proved that the percentage of soft drink consumers is higher than the smokers. Cigarettes and soft drinks have almost the same disadvantages (Khater, 2012).

In contrast, companies these days are challenging each other by whom to make the best product in order to higher the prices so that they increase their income (Valentine, 2001). Companies exploit some occasions to put an ad on their products. For example, during the World Cup, they put pictures of some famous players on the bottle to get the consumers' attention. And whoever likes that player would buy that product even if he doesn't like the product it self. All those crafty plans are to change people's mind about soft drinks and make more people buy them. They've studied marketing. So, they know what to do to get your attention as a customer. Moreover, it's losing money because it's a hundred percent harmful to your health (Valentine, 2001). Imagine that you drink at least two bottles per day, $3.00 per day. It means you are going to lose $1,080 per year, that's a vending machine's price. How about if you get it from a restaurant, it would be more expensive. 

Soft drinks could also cost money in other ways. Not just when you buy those drinks, but also when you get sick because of them. You would need the hospital and the treatment is not free (Valentine, 2001). 

According to D. Khater, per every 11 ounces can of a soft drink, there are ten teaspoons of sugar, that do not provide any nutritional benefit to the body. It provides harmful calories, hidden toxins that affect the whole body, and accelerates the advance of obesity. Drinking one 11 fl oz. case of a sweetened drink a day, leads to an increase of half a kilo a month, due to the content of the large amounts of sugar (Khater, 2012). Usually, when people make their own drink, such as a coffee or a tee or any kind of a drink, they don't put that much of sugar because they think it's not good for health. However, the amount of sugar per bottle is really high, and the same people who make their own drink and do not put that much amount of sugar still drink these sweated drinks. Is it an educational problem or just not paying attention? And according to Dr. Khater, it doesn't matter if it was a diet drink rather than the normal one, they both cause gaining of weigh.

Individuals tried to compare the diet and regular drinks in gaining weight. However, the experimenters were two girls, one of them drank a diet drinks, and the other drank regular drinks for a long period of time. The results at the end shows that both of them gained weight but the one who drank the diet drinks got less weight (Khater, 2012). The difference between regular and diet drinks is the percentage of the content in regular drinks and in the diets. For example, diet Coke contains less calories while regular Coke contains more. It's the same with everything else.

Lots of damages occur to your body and your health when you drink soda in addition to the obesity itself. One possible problem is the liver damage; drinking soda daily increases the probability of cirrhosis of the liver. Tooth decay is another problem; due to the severe acidity of those drinks, they melt the foreign layer of teeth actively. Also, it might increase the probability of the occurrence of tooth decay by 2-3 times compared with sugars found in sweets. It causes kidney stones; drinking four bottles of size (220 ml) weekly, would increase the likelihood of kidney stones by 15%. That's because of the Phosphoric acid, which changes the composition of urine in the body. Diabetes is yet another issue. Since these drinks cause obesity, they pave the way for diabetes. The amount of sugar in one package constitutes a heavy burden on the body to burn. Another problem is osteoporosis: these drinks decrease the proportion of calcium in the blood that insist the body's counterbalance for this deficiency by taking calcium from the bones. The body's bones gradually become weak and fragile bones. What is more, high consumption of these drinks, either regular or diet, causes high blood pressure as it increases blood viscosity and acidity. Furthermore, drinking more than two bottles daily would cause the metabolic syndrome, which is overweight, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and high cholesterol. When the human body gets the three of these symptoms, the human gets heart disease (Khater, 2012). All those diseases are caused by soft drinks, which in other words means: soft drinks are no different than poisons. So, why do you still drink it?

There's an article talks about goods and bads about drinking sodas. And the author basically mentioned 8 reasons of why people keep drinking soft drinks, which were: "tasty, easy to find, cheap, convenience (Grab-n-Go), advertising, thirst, caffeine addiction, and habit." And the author talked about each reason in details. Then, he mentioned other 18

 reasons of why people should quit it.

Another article reported that soft drinks and snacks have high taxes in some states. "Prior reports have stated that no state currently levies a ''tax'' on snack products (16,18); however, the data reported here confirmed that 40 states do, in fact, impose sales tax on soft drinks and/or snack products and, in several cases, these taxes are higher than the standard state sales tax for food products generally (i.e., disfavored tax status)" (Jamie, Shelby, Hannalori, Shely, Frank, 2008). And the reason for that is to lessen and control the use of soft drinks, which obviously going to cost a little extra money, so people won't go easy about it. And that's definitely beneficial in order to get healthier society. 

Some people might disagree with all of that by saying that they drink so much soft drinks and nothing happens to them or they don't get fat. Others might say that they've never gotten sick. And those rich people wouldn't care about the money that they lose. For the first group who never got fat yet, some physiques aren't easy to change, but don't forget about the illness that you might get out of soft drinks. For the second group, are you going to wait until you get sick? or until you die? Science tells how bad it is, and you must learn from that. Do you know that every time you drink soda, your bones are affected in a bad way. However, it's true that it wouldn't be different for rich people with money, but in one hand not all the people are rich, on the other hand, it's still a lot of money when you count it.

Another thing is that while you're eating, don't you feel full quickly when you start drinking soda? That's because it fills the stomach with harmful liquids that make you feel full, instead of filling it with real food.

A policeman said that there was a case about a worker who bought (500 ml) of soft drinks for his four children: Lalithaa-ten years old, Abhirami-8 years old, Kausalya-6 years old, and Paramasivan-3 years old. After a while of drinking, those four children said that they got a stomach and they felt they were going to vomit. Later, in Cuddalore Government General Hospital in Kurinjipadi, India, Abhirami died there, and the rest of them were in serious danger. The doctors there said it was because of the soft drink they drank (Dominique, 2014). Because of what and how dangerous soft drinks are made of, those children weren't old enough to handle the effects and one of them died. That's a solid proof of the damages soft drinks could do to your health.

In addition, minimizing the size of a soft drink bottle by the Board of Health would limit the serving size of sugary drinks, but it doesn't mean it will limit anyone's consumption. (Deas, 2013). It's actually a good idea of them doing that, but also that won't fix the problem here. Addicted consumers might get themselves a small can because it would be cheaper and drink it with their meal, but once they finish that small drink before they finish their meal, they will be considering getting two small cans instead of one every time.

There are other better drinks you can drink instead of soda. Water, for example. Do you know that you have to drink at least about 2 liters of water everyday, because 60 percent of your body depend on water. You can also drink green tea, juice, or even a red wine is fine. 

In conclusion, all these stories and diseases about the soft drinks proves how bad they are and how they have no benefit at all. It's obesity's main reason. It's also dangerous to the health, because it can damage lots of body organs. 

All this research is just to show the disadvantages of soft drinks and to lessen drinking soft drinks people and change their minds about it. 

