It turns out that drinking lots of cola is actually bad for you.  Like really bad.  Boing Boing posted this link today about people who drink so much cola that they actually get muscle paralysis from it, and I wasn’t going to read it until I saw the excerpt:

A research review carried out by Dr Elisaf and his colleagues has shown that symptoms can range from mild weakness to profound paralysis. Luckily all the patients studied made a rapid and full recovery after they stopped drinking cola and took oral or intravenous potassium.

The case studies looked at patients whose consumption ranged from two to nine liters of cola a day.

Holy hell batman!  I’m pretty sure I don’t drink 2 to 9 liters of ANYTHING a day, let alone cola.  It’s no surprise their bodies started to shut down.

Forget the muscle paralysis for a minute, however.  Let’s talk practically about drinking that much cola each day.  How can these people even function?  If I drink one can, I burp loud enough to wake the children and have to pee in about 10 minutes.  The study mentioned an ostrich farmer from the Australian Outback that drank 10 liters a day.  Those must be some laid back friggin ostriches, because that guy must sound like a foghorn and pee like a fountain.  You can probably hear him all over the Outback.

Amazing.  I love this quote:

He also relates a puzzling case he saw in his own clinical practice, which was solved when the patient turned up at his office with a two-litre bottle of cola in the basket of his electric scooter.

Now, I know they wrote “electric scooter”, that could mean any number of electric conveyances, but I can’t read that without thinking of a George Costanza-style scooter for the terminally lazy, instead of a legitimate medical reason to not walk.  I’m sorry, it’s just hard to imagine when we are also talking about muscle weakness due to cola gluttony, and the guy shows up with a 2 liter bottle at his doctor’s office.

Here’s a link to the article.

** Note:  In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote this while drinking a coffee that I take with rather more sugar than most.  I feel ok with that, since I generally have 2-3 coffees a day, that probably amounts to about 1 liter or so.  That and the fact that while it has been far too long since I had regular physical exercise, I can still walk around under my own power without abusing a defenceless electric motor.