Sugary drink producers drop prices around the world to keep people addicted to their deadly drinks

It’s a basic tenet of business that with the passage of time a product’s price will have to increase to keep pace with inflation, right? Consistently dropping your prices would be business suicide for most people, but not so for the multi-billion dollar soda industry. A study published in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease in early May shows that between 1990 and 2016, sugary drinks like Coca-Cola actually became more affordable in 79 of 82 countries surveyed.

In examining data from 42 developing, or low-income, countries and 40 high-income countries, the researchers determined that for the most part, more people were able to afford these toxic beverages because of a combination of higher earnings and lower prices.

“Overall in the countries we studied, a person in 2016 could buy 71 percent more sugar-sweetened beverages with the same share of their income than they could in 1990,” study co-author Jeffrey Drope of the American Cancer Society, noted in a press release. “Sugary drinks became even more affordable in developing countries, where 2016’s income could buy 89 percent more sugar-sweetened beverages than in 1990. That’s essentially half-price.”

That’s a very clever gamble on the part of the soda industry: Drop the price of your toxic sludge by almost half, but get millions more people hooked on it and still come out ahead in the long run.

Recognizing that this trend is unlikely to change, researchers are urging governments to levy higher taxes on sugary drinks to try to curb their effect on the global obesity problem. Unfortunately, with the virtually limitless resources that these companies have at their disposal, this tactic is unlikely to succeed. [RELATED: Did you know that there are at least 15 other drinks that are almost as bad as soda?]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is urging people to “rethink your drink,” encouraging changes like exchanging a medium café latte for a small one, and exchanging your sugary drink for a diet soda. They also recommend swapping sugar in your drinks with artificial sweeteners. This advice, while well-intentioned, is misguided.

A study published in the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke, which examined data collected from 2,888 people older than 45, and 1,484 over the age of 60, found that participants who drank an average of just one artificially sweetened drink a day, trebled their chances of suffering a stroke and developing dementia.

The fact is, switching one toxic, chemical drink for another is never going to solve the problem. And adding sweeteners to your drinks rather than sugar is going to take you from the frying pan straight into the fire. [Discover the sweet truth at Sweeteners.news]

If you’re serious about your health and longevity, cut out all sugary, processed foods and drinks. Replace them with non-GMO, organic fruits and vegetables, freshly pressed, unsweetened fruit juices, and pure, filtered water. A cup or two of organic coffee also offers loads of health benefits, but don’t overdo it. And give artificial sweeteners a wide berth.

In short, if you keep it natural, you won’t go wrong!

Sources:

MedicalXpress.com

CDC.gov

Stroke.AHAJournals.org