A 60-year-old man in Brazil has had to undergo emergency surgery to remove 35 kidney stones from his bladder after years of drinking around 3 litres of coca cola every day. 3 litres a day!
Brazil-based urologist Dr Thales Andrade took to Instagram to show off a dish filled with large, yellow stones as the patient lay behind him on the operating table…
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Nasty stuff. The guy could make a Zen rock sanctuary in his garden out of those things. It’s actually incredible that he managed to survive carrying those stones in his kidneys and bladder for so long!
So how does it happen exactly? Well, excessive soda, especially Coke, has loads of sugar and phosphoric acid in it, and when combined with calcium, oxalate and uric acid, they clump together and crystalise, forming kidney stones.
At that point, the stones can either stay in your kidney or start to travel down the urinary tract. If you’re lucky, the stones are small enough that you’ll pee them out into the toilet, but if they’re baby potato-sized like this Coke addict in Brazil, they’ll get stuck and cause immense pain.
In addition to knocking back 3 litres of Coke a day, this 60-year-old Brazilian man also had low water intake and an enlarged prostate, so he was basically begging to be riddled with kidney stones. There’s no mention if he was also a diabetic, but surely he had to be if he’s drinking that much Coca Cola every day.
Well anyway, if you’re something of a Coke addict, make sure you’re drinking equal amount of water to avoid a similar fate. In fact, chronic dehydration on its own can lead to kidney stones formation, so you should be drinking loads of water whether you’re a soda addict or not.
You have been warned.
For the study that found that drinking Coke leads to large testicles and more testosterone, click HERE. Worth the risk?
