I was talking to my good friend the other day and the topic was weight loss and diets. He informed me that by just changing my daily coke fix (which is so full of sugar) to a diet variety would reduce my weight. This could be achieved without any gym work or other sweat inducing exercises. ''Excellent'' I said to myself. I was intrigued and thought I would investigate further.

After a lot of reading and searching I found a lot of interesting and also frightening material on this subject.

Did you know that if you drink one can of normal coke a day, this is the equivalent of digesting six and a half 2.2kg bags of sugar in a year?

This sugar is converted by our body into fatty acids and stored. Now, if we don't exercise then we don't burn the fat and so it accumulates and, need I say any more? If you take a look at You Tube and just type in, ''What happens if you boil coke,'' you will see what is left after all the liquid evaporates = sugar. It makes you see what we put into our bodies. 

Next stop the ''healthier'' option, Diet Soda. I was a bit worried when I found many articles stating that at the start of the year, Diet Pepsi had swapped its use of aspartame with sucralose (or Splenda) but why? The use of aspartame has the approval of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other public health departments so it must be OK, right?

Not according to other reports, where the excess use can cause possible side effects such as headaches, stomach cramps, diarrhoea and bladder issues, to name a few. So due to customer fears and consumer feedback, Diet Pepsi axed aspartame (diminishing sales also helped the decision).

What to drink which is healthy and also safe, then?

Water. An interesting fact I learned was that it is predicted that bottled water will soon overtake sales of normal and diet soda, as consumers are ditching sugar laced drinks so H2O it is (or so I thought).

Many companies use BPA free plastic bottles (recycling and green issues) to house their water, but some scientists believe that properties in Bisphenol A mimic our body hormones and can affect puberty, menopause and may also be linked to cancers.

So a quick side step and start drinking the the no frills and always there tap water, what can possibly go wrong here? Well eight letters, spelling the word oestrogen.

An enviromental study showed that 30% of male fish tested were changing sex due to the female hormones found in the contraceptive pill (and HRT) which in turn is polluting our water system and is linked to male fertility problems. This cannot be removed in its entirety by our current sewage treatment, causing the problem. The solution? Still a tad confusing.