How Many Soda Drinks Will Kill You?

 

If you drink soda you're going to die. It could be in fifty years, it could be next week. Drink the devil's fizzy drink and bam- you're a goner. Of course the odds that soda had anything to actually do with your death, well, those vary, but you might be shocked at exactly how much. Turns out extremely sugary, carbonated drinks aren't something our bodies were evolutionary adapted for, which doesn't stop the world from drinking billions of liters of cola every year.

How Many Soda Drinks Will Kill You?

So how many carbonated drinks will kill you? First, let's answer this question literally-how many carbonated drinks will kill you? As in, how many physical soda cans would it take to murder you? Quick, what's one thing you come across all the time and is 4 to 8 times more likely to kill you than a shark? A vending machine. 

That's right, the innocuous vending machine, offering all sorts of sugary treats, is deadlier than a killing machine so perfect it has changed almost nothing since the age of the dinosaurs. Most vending machines come with a very clear' do not rock' warning, usually showing a machine tipping over and onto an unwary stick figure. 

There's a reason those warnings exist- because people really love to tip vending machines, hoping to score some free snacks or sodas, and vending machines absolutely love to crush the crap out of human beings dumb enough to tip them. Seriously, vending machines basically have a taste for human blood now, and it's sort of our fault for tipping them over going on seven decades straight. 

Death by soda machine comes from the crushing weight of the machine pushing down on you, which prevents you from expanding your chest in order to fill your lungs with sweet, sweet oxygen. Much like being caught in the grip of an anaconda, every time you exhale or scream for help, you're letting more air out and hastening your own death. 

However, the impact can sometimes cause serious broken bone injuries, which can lead directly to pierced lungs as shards of your broken ribs skewer your body under the weight of several hundred pounds of convenience. Punctured organs will also quickly lead to a whole body shut down- though in nearly every case you'll asphyxiate to death long before your skewered organs become a pressing concern. Get it? ‘Pressing concern’? 

How Many Soda Drinks Will Kill You?

 Because you’re being crushed to death? (Clear throat) But could you kill someone with a single soda can? The average soda can weighs 12 ounces, and we know from extensive research into boxing and football injuries- the American football that you play with your... hands- that all it takes to knock someone out is 22 newtons of force. 

With a 12 ounce soda can, even a lazy throw and be enough to clean someone’s clock. Toss one out a speeding vehicle and if it hits the right spot on the head, you’ve got yourself human road kill. Alright, but what about drinking the stuff? How bad is soda for you really, and can it kill you? There's a famous myth about leaving a steak soaking in coca cola for a few days, and you'll see it completely dissolved.

 This myth, which your mom has probably posted on your facebook wall at least three times in your life, plays on the names of the scary sounding acids listed under the ingredients of most sodas, and the common sense belief that if acid melted Harvey Dent into the infamous villain two-face, as well as several of Roger Rabbit's best friends, then surely any acid is going to eat a hole right through you.

 You'll be happy to know that no, the acids present in any soda in the world aren't going to eat through your stomach lining, much less a piece of steak. However, the myth is based on a kernel of truth, as soda can, and is, in fact used as a meat tenderizer. In the American south, where physical health comes in at a distant second to deliciousness, many barbeque joints actually tenderize their meats in various sodas. 

The soda leaves behind traces of vanilla, cinnamon, and citrus flavoring, and because soda has a pH level of 2.7, it's acidic enough to break down some of the proteins in the meat, therefore tenderizing it. So next time you're throwing a backyard barbecue, surprise your friends with some delicious diabetes by soaking your meat in soda for24 hours before throwing it on the grill. 

Just because a soda won't dissolve you from the inside out though, doesn't mean the other ingredients in it won't kill you- and all it takes is one single soda a day. Depending on where you live in the world, your soda either comes with high fructose corn syrup, or regular old sugar. High fructose corn syrup is metabolized by the liver, and often stored as fat directly on the liver itself. 

This often leads to non-alcohol fatty liver disease, which affects 20-30% of adults in first world countries, and can itself lead to liver cancer, cirrhosis, and cardiovascular disease. Just one soda a day is enough to gradually overwhelm your liver. But just one soda a day is also a one-way ticket to obesity, and death via the myriad of complications that accompany being obese. 

One soda a day can lead to a weight gain of15 pounds a year, if all other calorie intake remains the same. Every year in the US, 3.4 million people die from complications arising from obesity, with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer being the leading killers. On a diet of one to two sodas daily, the average individual will have a 26% increased risk of developing diabetes. 

Of course the longer you continue your one or two daily soda habit, the greater the risk grows as other risk factors also increase due to your poor diet. A one soda a day diet however doesn't just limit the damage it does to your insides. Cirrhosis caused by your daily soda habit can directly lead to oral manifestations of your severely damaged liver. 

These include bleeding from the gums, a yellowing of the skin as your liver gradually shuts down, halitosis- or medical-grade bad breath-ch elates, which causes your lips to swell, dry mouth, grinding of the teeth, and crusty, scaly skin. Your daily soda might also contain a heaping helping of aspartame, which is a sweetener that's 180 times more potent than sugar, but has none of the calories. 

Normally, this is a total win-win, and if you have a moderate soda drinking habit, it really is. However, if you're downing sodas like an obese Popeye chugging spinach, you're going to be ingesting a whole lot of aspartame. The LD50 of aspartame- or the level at which a concentration is considered lethal to 50% of the population, is 10,000 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. 

That's actually a lot safer than even common table salt, which is lethal at a concentration of 3,000 milligrams per kilogram. However, that does not mean that regularly filling up on aspartame isn't going to have some serious, and potentially lethal effects. For starters, you could be one of the extremely rare people who can't metabolize one or more of the compounds that aspartame is broken down into by the body, such as phenylalanine. 

This can lead to seizures and even mental retardation. In 1985 a study discovered that a human being can intake as much as 50mg per kilogram of body weight of aspartame with no immediate ill effects. For a 120 pound individual, this would mean they'd have to consume 15 cans of soda to reach this threshold. Sounds safe, you're nowhere near that much soda intake- except with over 6,000 other foods that contain aspartame, you run the risk of gradually reaching a critical saturation point. 

With up to 300 days for aspartame to be metabolized by the body, drinking a soda a day can lead to high concentrations of the chemical in your body. This can lead to confusion, memory loss, facial pain, seizures, weight gain, depression, hearing loss, slurred speech, cancer, type 2 diabetes, on-Hodgkin lymphoma, and leukemia. 

How Many Soda Drinks Will Kill You?

The greatest killer in your soda though maybe... caffeine. With an LD50 of 150-200 milligrams per kilogram, caffeine is exponentially more deadly than aspartame if consumed in large quantities. Most sodas contain approximately 50 milligrams of caffeine, which means death by caffeine would require 186 sodas drank back to back. If you look at the ingredients list of a coca cola can, it's deceptively simple. 

There's carbonated water, sugar (or high fructose corn syrup), caramel color, phosphoric acid, caffeine, and natural flavors. Seems innocuous, except coca cola doesn't bother to list the actual ingredients which make up their trademark caramel coloring, because those ingredients are death. Well, not quite, but close. 2-methylimidazole- or 2-MI- and 4-methylimidazole-or 4-MI- are known carcinogens, and both help make up the warm caramel coloring of coca cola. 

In Europe these chemicals have been replaced with natural plant-based dyes, but in America we believe in freedom and not in government interference. In this case, freedom means that soda companies have the freedom to increase their profits by using cheaper chemicals that will definitely give you cancer. 

In 2011 the Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the US Food and Drug administration to actually do its job and ban 2-MI and 4-MI, along with other food coloring chemicals known to cause cancer. 

The US Food and Drug administration very promptly did its job, and took a bunch of money from corporate lobbyists to make sure that the chemicals didn't get the ban hammer. In defense of not forcing the American beverage industry to adopt the same, much safer alternatives used in Europe, the FDA issued a statement highlighting that an individual would have to drink 1,000 sodas a day to reach the doses shown to cause cancer in test rats. 

How Many Soda Drinks Will Kill You?

However, the statement failed to address concerns over 2-MI and 4-MI build up in the human body amongst soda drinkers who regularly imbibed their favorite drink. To reassure a nervous public, the CEO of D.D Williamson, largest supplier of caramel coloring in the world, and someone who definitely is an impartial authority on the matter, released a statement saying, “Caramel color is now-and has always been- safe and harmless.” 

And you can take his word on that, because like we just said, as the CEO of the largest supplier of caramel coloring, he is an absolutely impartial authority. In a bit of good news for Americans waking up to the nightmare that they actually live in a Corporate Libertarian dystopia, Coca Cola did agree to use coloring with lower levels of 4-MI. 

After all, dead customers can't drink coke. Alright, so we all probably knew that drinking one soda a day was bound to be pretty unhealthy, if not eventually outright fatal- but how many sodas would it take to kill you in one sitting? As we mentioned before, 186 sodas will kill you flat from caffeine overdose, but you'd actually be dead long before that. 

Your stomach can comfortably hold a snug 3liters of Twinkies devoured to comfort yourself after another Saturday night League of Legends losing spree because you totally called AD carry but noobs instalocked every. Single. Damn. Time. And of course nobody bothered to play support. 

However, once you start pushing those 3 liters, your stomach runs the risk of bursting, with a pretty much guaranteed burst occurring at5 liters of stomach content. For our American viewers, that's approximately1.4 freedom bald eagles. 

How Many Soda Drinks Will Kill You?

At just 14 sodas, your stomach can rupture from the stress put on it, and this can be a great way to meet your maker. In 2003 a Japanese man was found dead in a public bathroom after overeating which caused his stomach to rupture. If this happens to you, you can look forward to all the contents of your stomach spilling all over your internal organs, which is as upper good way to cause infection. 

Stomach acid, bile, and 14 sodas will soon be covering all of your internal organs, and without immediate surgery you will absolutely die. Now go watch I drank only soda for a month and this is what happened. Or click this other video instead. Aqua man is a terrible superhero.