REAL LIFE NEWS: SEE, I TOLD YOU SODA WAS BAD FOR YOU!
by Hazed
A woman in New Zealand has just died from drinking too much Coca-Cola.
30-year-old Natasha Harris died three years ago after a cardiac arrest, and a coroner has just ruled that the soda was to blame.
Now before you start panicking, bear in mind that Natasha had a serious coke habit. (No, not that sort of coke!) She drank up to ten litres of the sickly fizzy drink every day. This meant she was taking in twice the recommended safe limit of caffeine and over eleven times the recommended daily sugar intake. It was calculated her daily intake came to more than 1kg of sugar and 970mg of caffeine - the equivalent of eight espresso shots.
She would get withdrawal symptoms if she didn’t have her daily fix of coke. Her family said she would “go crazy if she ran out... she would get the shakes, withdrawal symptoms, be angry, on edge and snappy.” She drank so much her teeth rotted and had to be removed.
Her excessive coke consumption wasn’t her only unhealthy habit: she smoked 30 cigarettes a day, and hardly ate anything, skipping breakfast, eating a small lunch and then hardly ever having an evening meal. She’d often throw up when she woke up in the morning.
The Coroner ruled that her Coca-Cola consumption had caused a cardiac arrhythmia, which means the heart beats too fast or too slow. He said, “I find that when all the available evidence is considered, were it not for the consumption of very large quantities of Coke by Natasha Harris, it is unlikely that she would have died when she died and how she died.
“On the balance of probabilities it is more likely than not that the drinking of very large quantities of Coke was a substantial factor that contributed to the development of metabolic imbalances, which gave rise to the arrhythmia.”
These imbalances were probably caused by the fact that while she got a lot of energy from the soda, she wasn’t getting other essential nutrients such as protein because of her failure to eat. Her body would have therefore got the protein it needed from her own muscle tissue - including from her heart.
The coroner said that the Coca-Cola company couldn’t be held responsible for the health of consumers who drank its product to excess. He criticised Ms Harris and her family for not heeding warning signs about her ill health, but also said soft drinks companies should display clearer warnings on their drinks.
