The rather alarming image shows just how much damage soft drinks do to you after just one hour.
A new infographic produced by health writer Wade Meredith at SFGate.com shows that drinking just one can of Coke can have dramatic effects on your body after just an hour.
The information, of course, applies to any soft drink, with Coke being simply the most popular brand. It was created using research on how the body reacts to a sudden dose of caffeine and sugar.
A can of Coke has a whopping 10 teaspoons of sugar, and in just 10 minutes you would vomit from that much sweetness if it weren’t for the phosphoric acid cutting through the flavor to allow your stomach and your taste buds to handle it.
Just 20 minutes after consuming the beverage, your liver starts cranking out fat using the sugar that you just gave it.
After 40 minutes, your body has consumed all of the caffeine, and the effects on the body are acute: blood pressure rises, the liver puts more sugar into your bloodstream, and your pupils begin to dilate.
Five minutes after that, you’ve reached the peak of your high as your body produces dopamine, the pleasure centers of your brain, which is similar to how heroin works.
Once you get to 60 minutes, it’s the dreaded sugar crash as everything comes to a screeching halt and you’re left feeling worse off than before.
Americans consume a huge quantity of soft drinks like Coke every day, and medical experts say that it’s a big contributor to the obesity epidemic in the nation. But as this infographic shows, it’s not just the long-term effects of soft drink consumption that is wreaking havoc on the body: in just an hour’s time, people can think they’re supercharging their bodies with a quick dose of sugar and caffeine, but they’re just setting themselves up for a big crash later.