The Elixir of Life

When dealing with either one's personal weight issues or the obesity epidemic as a whole, it was once sort of natural to focus mostly on high calorie foods people, particularly those high in fat and/or carbohydrates. More and more, however, attention has focused on the liquids we all drink.

That makes sense. There's no getting around the responsibility that sugary sodas and juices have for the added pounds that can lead to everything from social isolation and depression to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and much more.

At the same time, sometimes it seems as if we've gone a bit overboard in attacking flavored beverages, even the low calorie ones. Calorie-free diet sodas have come in for an enormous amount of criticism recently for supposedly contributing to weight gain in some fashion -- a notion that some of us, at least, find more than a little counter-intuitive.

Diet soda drinkers can take at least some comfort in a study that came out this week that showed the opposite of what some earlier studies had suggested. This time around, at least, diet sodas seemed to actually support weight loss. It's just one study, of course, but all we know for sure is that we'd rather people drink diet soft drinks than their calorie-laden cousins. As a top provider of weight loss surgery in Los Angeles, we've seen the damage consuming highly caloric beverages on a daily basis can do.

Even so, we do have to say that everyone's go-to drink really ought to be plain old water. Water really is the elixir of life. Drinking more of it makes us healthier and happier and it doesn't have the added chemicals that may or may not lead to health issues. It's good stuff.