Essay Sample about Sweetened Beverages
You know that soda can or juice box you drank? Well, that had more sugar in it than the amount you should drink in a day. But you wouldn't know that because there is no warning label telling you. There should definitely be warning labels on sugary drinks due to the fact that sugar can cause potential health problems, it is addictive, and there is proof that warning labels have worked in the past.
To start off, sweetened beverages prove to put people at risk for a lot of potential health problems. They can rot your teeth and can turn your liver into a useless lump of scar tissue, just like what happens to alcoholics after years of drinking alcohol. Why? Because of sugar. Other than rotting away your teeth, and transforming your liver into little more than scar tissue, sugar is one of the main reasons people develop heart diseases and diabetes. Not to mention obesity. Obesity is a huge problem in the U.S, and most of it comes from sugar. Well, now you might be asking something along the lines of, “If sugar is in everything, then why put warning labels only on sugary drinks?” You might be thinking that this idea is silly, as we might as well put warning labels on everything. Well, you would be wrong. Sugar in drinks is particularly horrible for your body. The sugar in foods is absorbed slower, due to the fibers in the food to help the body digest the sugar. Take an apple, for example. It has a lot of fiber, slowing down the absorption process. Drinking apple juice, however, is like sending a sugar bullet piercing into your gut.
Not only is sugar bad for your body, it’s addictive too. The sugar in sweetened drinks is as addictive as cocaine, and brain scans have shown that sugar affects the brain the same way that addictive drugs do. 10,000 years ago, new Guineans found, what turned out to be a bad idea, that they could grow sugarcane as a crop. Obviously, they loved the taste of sugar. It became a part of religion, which shows how addictive this delicious sweetener is. Not only that, but Americans eat almost 4 times the sugar daily, then they did 200 years ago. You may be wondering why. Well, that’s due to the fact that scientists and our government told us that fat makes us fat. Without fat, however, food tastes bland and plain. So they needed to sweeten it, and what’s better to sweeten stuff with than sugar? If you have had cereal, and have ever tilted your bowl to your mouth to slurp up that last bit of sugar-loaded milk, you could see how this is true.
Now that we have shown how sugar can be addictive, let’s talk more about warning labels. CA Senate is working on putting labels on sugary drinks. This is because warning labels have been proven to work with cigarette smokers. What do I mean by that? Well, the laws that changed cigarette packaging are believed to have saved more than 8 million American lives since 1964. This shows that warning labels do work! Not to mention drink companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars saying that their drinks are delicious and good for you. This is proving that even the drink companies know warning labels would decrease sugary drink reliability. If warning labels worked to save millions of smokers, then imagine how many people warning labels on sugary drinks could save!
Since you have seen how sugar in sugary drinks can impact health, how addictive sugar actually is, and how warning labels could help save lives, I am sure you agree when we say warning labels on sugary drinks are necessary. They could save people from all sorts of health issues and could decrease reliance on sugar. If that’s not sweet, I don’t know what is.
