Stay well this winter - DRINK lots of water!

I am losing fans quickly, I am sure, but in this time of the year where colds and flus abound, the real trick to staying healthy is what you are eating. So, here's my final post on caffeine (and really, this post is more about the sugar than the caffeine).

From Dr. Mercola:

As of 2005, white bread was dethroned as the number one source of calories in the American diet, being replaced by soft drinks. During the past half-century, the number of carbonated soft-drink drinkers rose more than 450 percent and jumped from 11 gallons in 1946 to 49 gallons in the year 2000. Currently, the average American drinks more than 60 gallons of soft drinks each year. During this time, obesity rates have skyrocketed.

If you think you don't drink too much of this stuff, consider this:

Just one extra can of soda per day can add as much as 15 pounds to your weight over the course of a single year!

How Soda Affects Your Body

First of all, just one can of Coke contains 10 teaspoons of sugar. This is 100 percent of your recommended daily intake (which is more than double my recommended daily allowance to begin with). Within 20 minutes of drinking that soda, your blood sugar spikes, and your liver responds to the resulting insulin burst by turning massive amounts of sugar into fat.

• Within 40 minutes, your blood pressure rises due to your body having absorbed all the caffeine, and then your livers dumps even more sugar into your bloodstream.
• After about one hour, you’ll start to have a sugar crash, which oftentimes leads you into a vicious cycle of consuming more stimulants, followed by crashes, throughout your day.
• It is also a proven fact that sugar increases your insulin levels, which can lead to not only weight gain, but also high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, premature aging and many more negative side effects. In fact, sugar is so bad for your health in so many ways, I even created an entire list outlining 100-Plus Ways in Which Sugar Can Damage Your Health.
• Soda drinkers also have higher cancer risk, and soda has even been shown to cause DNA damage – courtesy of sodium benzoate, a common preservative found in many soft drinks, which has the ability to switch off vital parts of your DNA. This could eventually lead to diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver and Parkinson's.

So needless to say, anything that will curb the excessive consumption of soda can be a good move – as long as consumers aren’t willing to simply shell out more money for their daily soda fix…

So, what should I drink? What does Running Gal drink?

Mostly water. 99% of what I drink, is just water. I wouldn't drink it from our tap, as it's flouridated and chlorinated. We have the blessing of having an amazing earth spring that produces some of the purest water on earth - so we pay about $30 a month to have it delivered to our house. Locals - you can click this link to check it out: Earth2O

This water is naturally filtered and purified by thousands of layers of volcanic basalt into lava aquifer before humans walked the planet. Native Americans first noticed this spring when they saw the vibrant blue eddy it creates in the Crooked River gushing organic natural purity. The water that exits this aquifer has a natural purity that cannot be found in a shallow spring water. It has no need for reverse osmosis treatment and no need for chemical treatment. The water is piped directly to the Earth2O plant.

I love this water as I don't have to use a filter that is not capable of getting all the chlorine and other municipal water system chemicals out - this water has never had chlorine or other junk in it!

Dr. Mercola says this of water: It has long been my belief that one of the simplest and easiest steps the typical person can make to start taking control of their health is to replace ALL their fluid intake to pure water. If everyone were to take this one simple step there would be an explosion of health, and a dramatic drop in nearly all diseases.