I was talking with my friend Dr. Travis Stork—host of TV's The Doctors—about his other gig, running the emergency room at Vanderbilt Medical Center. Though he educates millions about healthy living on TV, he comes up against some tough customers in the E.R. Like the woman who came in suffering complications from diabetes, and slurped from a 40-ounce soda as she described her symptoms! Clearly, some people still don’t realize just how responsible these drinks are for the ballooning of our waistlines. So much so, in fact, that one study that tracked the diets of more than 800 people found those who eliminated 100 liquid calories a day lost five times as much weight as those who cut 100 food calories. That means you’ll lose more weight by giving up soda than you will by passing on pizza. That’s great news for you, but really bad news for the soda industry—which depends on Big Gulps and the like to sweeten its bottom line (and expand yours).

So now the beverage industry is responding by casting their beverages in a new light. Today we hear of sweetened tea drinks brimming with antioxidants, 1,200-calorie smoothies that are "all natural" (so are sharks and hurricanes, by the way), and vitamin drinks that give you super-human strength. Not all of these drinks explicitly brand themselves “diet” drinks—the FDA would never allow that. But they are using clever marketing campaigns to convince us that they’re vastly superior to the sugary syrups of yore. Problem is, many of these fluid flab-makers are actually worse than the drinks they aim to replace! But the good news is, you can fight back—and lose up to 20 pounds annually, for starters, just by swearing off the soda and iced tea. Then, shed even more weight by avoiding these dangerous "diet" drinks, compliments of the latest research from Drink This, Not That!