Pop, Junk Food & The Heart Rate

Taste buds are an ingenious mechanism. Your body constantly needs food and liquid to replenish the energy it expends, and your taste buds are one way your body motivates you to go out and get that food. But you live in a world where vast corporations spend billions of dollars each year to promote foods and drinks that do your body more harm than good. Junk food and soda, tasty as they may be, can have adverse affects on your health. If you're accustomed to indulging your taste buds thoughtlessly and your heart isn't beating right, your body may be prompting you to think about what you're consuming.

Empty Calories

Calories are energy for your body. In their efforts to scare, manipulate and confuse consumers, food and drink marketers often portray calories as an enemy or a threat, or suggest that some calories are good and some calories are bad. None of this is true. Calories in healthy foods and beverages are the same as calories in junk food and soda. The difference is that healthy foods deliver vital nutrients and vitamins to your body that help it use caloric energy efficiently, while junk food and soda contains less of this nutrition, or none at all.

Cholesterol and Fat

Junk food, such as fast food hamburgers or sugary sweets, are loaded with cholesterol, saturated fats and sometimes trans fats that your body doesn't process or expel as easily as healthy fats. When you overload your system with food containing cholesterol and unhealthy fats, they leave unprocessed deposits in your bloodstream that interfere with the flow of blood through your system. This forces your heart to beat harder and faster to keep the blood circulating.

Junk Food and Exercise

The harder you make your heart work to perform its basic functions, the less energy it has to cope with the stress of exercise or other stimuli. One of the important functions of rigorous aerobic exercise is that it trains your heart to work more efficiently. The more you move your body, the stronger your heart gets, and the stronger it gets, the more efficiently it can work to send your blood where it needs to go. Junk food doesn't deliver the vitamins and nutrients your body and brain need for exercise.

Your Heart and Soda

Soft drinks typically contain two ingredients that prompt your heart to beat faster and therefore work harder than necessary: caffeine and sugar. Caffeine is an addictive drug that stimulates your nervous system. The non-nutritive sugars contained in typical soft drink sweeteners like high-fructose corn syrup clog your system with fats. The American Heart Association recommended in 2009 that people should get no more than 5 percent of their dietary calories from sugar. Since soft drinks contain nothing your body needs, and ingredients that interfere with its functions, it makes sense to consider moderating or entirely eliminating your consumption of them.