How much harm can one little drink do?
Cut soft drinks out of your life today! It’s the simple and easy way to save yourself hundreds of dollars a year and lose 20 pounds or more a year painlessly.
Whether you’re from up north and refer to it as pop, down south and call it coke, or somewhere else and call it soda, ask yourself this question: how much harm can one little drink do?
Read on to find out just how much damage you’re doing to your wallet and your body by regularly drinking soft drinks!
Money Saving Breakdown – Cut Soft Drinks Out of Your Life Today!
- Difficulty (Super Easy/Easy/Medium/Hard/Expert): Medium
- Average Savings per Year ($/year): 657
- Time Required (mins): 5
- Savings for your time ($/hr): 7,884
Financial Impact
Most articles or blog posts that you’ll read start with the health consequences of consuming large amounts of soda. I’m going to change things up a bit and discuss the financial impact first since that’s probably the main reason that you’re here.
One little can or bottle of coke doesn’t cost all that much. So, what’s the problem? As with most ways to save money, it’s the little things that add up over time to create a big dent in your annual savings.
I admit, I had to perform a fair amount of research for this post because I haven’t bought soda in longer than I can remember. If you buy your soft drinks in bulk from the grocery store, it seems that a good average price is around $0.35 for a 12 oz can. Obviously, prices sky-rocket up if you regularly purchase from vending machines or restaurants.
While researching, I ran across some staggering information. On average, Americans drink 44 gallons of soda per year! This is equivalent to nine 12 oz cans of soda per week. At that rate, using $0.35 a can, this would put the annual spending on soda for a family of four at $657! Sweet mother of god!
Check out the table below to find out exactly where you fall in terms of your annual spending on soft drinks. An additional dimension to consider for how much you’ll spend a year on soda is if you frequent restaurants. If you regularly get a soft drink when you visit a restaurant, then you’re probably paying an almost 700% or higher markup (I assumed $2.50 vs. $0.35 for 12 oz.). Remember that this table is just for a single person, so if you have a family of four you’ll need to add in how much they drink in your estimate for number of drinks per week.
Annual Spending on Soft Drinks – Where do you fall?
You can see that for the hardcore soda consumer, they could easily be spending more than $1,000 a year on this stuff! Crazy!! Let’s move onto the health implications and see if there is better news there.
Health Impact
OK, the news on the health side is even worse (if you ask me). Given that the average American drinks 44 gallons of soft drinks each year ( or nine 12 oz cans per week), this means that the average American is consuming an additional 64,000+ calories annually because of their soft drink consuming habit (assuming an average of 138 calories per 12 oz soft drink).
If we break down the 64,000+ calories to what most of us actually care about, (our weight when we step on the scale) we’ll see that the average American level of soda consumption can cause an additional 17+ pounds of fat gain over the course of a year!!!
Put another way, you would have to spend an extra 100+ hours a year performing vigorous exercise (something like running) to work off all of those extra calories and maintain your weight. If one could simply cut out soft drinks all together, you’d free up an additional two hours of your life each week! Who wouldn’t enjoy that?
Check out the table below to see where you fall in terms of how many additional calories you’re consuming each year by drinking soda. For the most hardcore soda drinkers among us, they’d have to exercise an additional 8+ hours per week to not gain weight!
Annual Weight Impact by Drinking Soda – Where do you fall?
I think most of us are pretty well versed in all of the health consequences that come with being overweight, so I won’t go into that here. Suffice it to say, I think many Americans would have a hard time finding an extra 2+ hours a week to burn off all these additional calories. So in the long run, people that routinely drink soda are doing real and long-lasting harm to their bodies.
Summary
To wrap things up, if I told you I had a no-cost way that the average American person could:
- save $657 per year for a family of four
- avoid putting on 17+ Lbs per year
- free up an additional two hours each week
- make the whole decision to change in less than five minutes
would you take me up on it? Because this decision can be made in less than five minutes, this gives us a savings of $7,884 per hour of your time. It’s basically a freebie! So, what are you waiting for? Cut Soft Drinks out of your life today!!!
I dont drink as much soda I a used to but I still have the occassional GingerAle here and there. I know a lot of people who spend more then the 700$ on just themself on soft drinks. Its not just soda though alot lot of these drinks are high sugar and cost a lot especially those red bulls. People buy those like hotcakes.
Thankfully we got off the soda wagon 5 or 6 years ago.
I never was much into the Red Bulls, they taste like you’re drinking some kind of hazardous chemical!
I didn’t realize the cost savings could be so high.
My #1 reason for avoiding sodas has always been concern about Aluminum in the cans (a cause of Alzheimer among other things) and other harmful chemicals. This post is another big reason for eliminating sodas. You may want to add most processed fruit juices which are loaded with sugar. Great post!
Liz, good point about the aluminum and other harmful chemicals. I hadn’t even considered that!
Fruit juices are just as bad if not worse, great point!