A few posts ago, we gave you 6 Reasons to Drink More Water. Now we have one more: It’s so much better for you than drinking soda.

We all know that drinking too much soda is bad for your teeth and waistline, but researchers have uncovered all sorts of other scary health effects of drinking Coca Cola, Mountain Dew, and their many soft drink relatives.

Health Reasons to Skip the Soda (and Just Drink Water)

While Coca Cola and Pepsi Co both recently agreed to reformulate their caramel coloring to reduce a carcinogenic ingredient banned in California, there are many other scary reasons to cut back.

1. Soda Drinkers Accumulate Fat in Dangerous, Hard-to-Detect Places

Some of the health effects correlated with soda consumption may actually be due to the likelihood that calories from these sugared drinks displace healthier beverages that would have provided important nutrients or that heavy soda drinkers have a poor diet overall. However, a recent Danish study connects non-diet soda consumption to dangerous fat accumulation in the liver and skeleton even when non-soda drinkers consumed the same calories.

“Researchers asked participants to drink either regular soda, milk containing the same amount of calories as regular soda, diet cola, or water every day for six months. The results? Total fat mass remained the same across all beverage-consuming groups, but regular-soda drinkers experienced dramatic increases in harmful hidden fats, including liver fat and skeletal fat,” The Daily Times reports.

2. BPA in Soda Can Liners Mimic Hormones

In February 2012, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported that it found the plastic softener bisphenol-a in 96% of the cans of soda it tested. Both the beverage companies and Health Canada assured the public that the levels of BPA exposure from soda is not dangerous. However, people are exposed to BPA from hundreds of possible sources.

Dr. Frederick vom Saal, a biologist at the University of Missouri at Columbia known for discovering health problems linked to exposure to common chemicals in everyday products told the Globe and Mail: “there is also a growing body of scientific literature, based on animal experiments, that has found harmful effects due to BPA at concentrations up to 1,000 times below Health Canada's safety limit. These conditions include such hormonally linked illnesses as breast cancer, and Dr. vom Saal called the government's assurances of no harm ‘simple-minded.’”

3. Flame-retardants In Citrus-Flavored Soft-Drinks And Sports-Drinks

Soda companies’ use brominated vegetable oil (BVO) to keep ingredients from separating in approximately 10 percent of sodas including Mountain Dew and other citrus flavored soft drinks. BVO is patented as a flame retardant in Japan and banned in food products in Europe.

“After a few extreme soda binges — not too far from what many [video] gamers regularly consume – a few patients have needed medical attention for skin lesions, memory loss and nerve disorders, all symptoms of overexposure to bromine,” according to a recent article in Environmental News.

4. Corn-syrup from Sweetened Beverages Comes from Genetically Modified Corn

More than 85% of the corn grown in the United States is genetically modified (gmo). And most of that goes into processed foods and animal feed. According to The Center for Food Safety, “[h]uman health effects can include higher risks of toxicity, allergenicity, antibiotic resistance, immune-suppression and cancer.”

Environmental Reasons to Pass on Pop (and Just Drink Water)

5. Artificial Sweeteners in Soda End Up In Drinking Water

In a 2009 study published in Environmental Science & Technology researchers found that sweeteners in the soda we are drinking are not being filtered out by sewerage treatment plants are circulating back around in our drinking water again.

6. Soda Has a Big Water Footprint

According to a Wall Street Journal article, it takes as much as 132 gallons of water to make a 2-liter bottle of soda. Some of that water is used in farming the ingredients and some is used in the manufacture and bottling. All that water has to come from somewhere. Farmers near Mehdiganj in northern India blame the local Coca Cola bottling plant for a 6-meter drop in the water table since 2000 when the plant opened.

Bonus, Totally Unsurprising Reason to Choose Water Over Soda

1. Filtered Water Tastes Great and Is Much Cheaper than Soda

The first 6000 gallons filtered through your Berkey water filter costs less than $0.02. Once you’ve replaced the filter in the same durable housing, your per gallon cost even less. That compares to more than $4 per gallon for soda by the can.