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You'll be as shocked -- and horrified -- as I was when you read this.  Pepsi has finally agreed to dump the carcinogen that's been in its drinks for years. According to smartplanet.com, "The chemical in question is called 4-methylimidazole (4-MeI) and it’s used for the soda’s carmel coloring." But Pepsi has long known that it can cause cancer.  Of course, it all started in California, where many health trends originate, when the state last year began to require companies to label any known carcinogens in their products.  The Center for Environmental Health pressured both Coca-Cola and Pepsi to remove 4-Mel from its sodas, and they said they would. But unless you live in California, it's still in your Pepsi. Both companies have since removed the chemical in California products, only Pepsi still uses the chemical outside California according to tests done by the environmental group, Tyler Falk reports. Now Pepsi is vowing to make a c...

OK.  So we know they're bad for us, NYC's Bloomberg's tried to put an end to them.  But did you know they can kill us? A Harvard s tudy has just found that 180,000 people a year die worldwide, and 25,000 in the U.S., from sugary drinks. "We know that sugar-sweetened beverages are linked to obesity, and that a large number of deaths are caused by obesity-related diseases. But until now, nobody had really put these pieces together," said Gitanjali Singh, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study presented today at the American Heart Association's annual meeting in New Orleans, Bay News 9 reports. The study adds to "mounting evidence that sugar-sweetened beverages, loaded with calories that carry little nutritional value, are a public health hazard," the story notes. You may want to argue the facts a little "but the team tied sugar-sweetened beverages to 133,000 deaths from...