When You Drink Coca-Cola Every Day, This Is What Happens To Your Digestive System

If you followed the Summer Olympics in Paris, you probably heard the controversy about the toxicity of the Seine, which raised concerns about swimming events. To ward off any bacterial infection from pathogens such as E. coli, swimmers turned to Coca-Cola. The idea was that Coke had some ingredients like phosphoric acid that could kill any bacteria.

However, your stomach is already pretty acidic, thanks to the hydrochloric acid. In fact, your stomach is more acidic than a Coke (per 220 Triathlon). Although a 2015 study in Cumhuriyet Science Journal found that colas sold in Turkey had an antibacterial effect against bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella, this study was conducted in Petri dishes rather than on people.

Drinking Coca-Cola and other sugar-sweetened drinks might have the opposite effect on your digestive system, according to a 2023 study in Nutrition, Metabolism, and Cardiovascular Diseases. When you drink soda like Coca-Cola every day, your gut bacteria produce chemicals linked to poor metabolic health, obesity, and high cholesterol. These metabolites could lead to conditions such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Sugar-sweetened drinks like Coke are also linked with other chronic conditions related to your digestive system.

Some athletes might drink a Coke after an event to replenish their body's lost glycogen. You'll even find flat Coke at the last few miles of endurance races like Ironman to give athletes a kick of caffeine and sugar to finish. Yet the excess sugar in drinks like Coke combined with a high-fat diet can disrupt your gut microbiome. A 2023 study in The Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry found that this combo can increase inflammation in your gut that could lead to inflammatory bowel diseases like colitis.

Drinking soda every day also increases your risk for certain types of cancer, according to a 2014 study in the European Journal of Nutrition. After tracking more than 470,000 people over 11 years, those who drank six soft drinks a week had an 83% higher risk of developing liver cancer than those who abstained from them. However, drinking fruit and vegetable juice wasn't linked to liver cancer.

You might assume that it's the sugar in soft drinks that disrupts your digestive system, but research shows that diet soda doesn't fare much better than regular soda for your digestive health. A 2021 meta-analysis in Public Health Nutrition pooled the results of 21 case-control studies and 17 cohort studies that focused on the link between artificially sweetened soft drinks and cancer. Although these diet sodas weren't linked with cancer overall, they are linked with a 28% higher risk of liver cancer.

Drinking diet soda might reduce the number of calories you consume, but they're linked to other health problems, according to a 2023 review in Advances in Nutrition. Strong evidence suggests that artificially sweetened sodas increase your risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. The more artificially sweetened drinks you consume, the higher your early death risk, according to a 2021 meta-analysis in Advances in Nutrition. Drinking 2.5 diet sodas a day is linked to a 13% higher risk of all-cause mortality and a 25% higher risk of dying from heart disease.