Things You Should Never Put In Your Drink

With all the tough decisions we face in life, your beverage should be a simple one. Unfortunately, that's not always an easy choice, either. 

Say you choose coffee in the morning, water during the day, and tea at night. Those are all perfectly fine choices, but there's still some pretty shocking ways you might be not only ruining your diet, but opening yourself up to risk of severe illness and, in one case, even injury — from a drink!

It's all down to what you put in your drink. A slice of lemon or a wedge of lime might seem harmless, it's fruit, after all. You've probably heard good things about apple cider vinegar, and you may have even made the switch from sugar to artificial sweetener, all with the best of intentions. But there are pitfalls to all of these — and other drink add-ins, and knowing what they are might help you decide whether or not you really, really need those additions to your beverage. Sometimes, you should just let the drink stand on its own, and here's why.

The Virginia Cooperative Extension took an in-depth look at just what you're putting in your coffee when you reach for either liquid or powdered non-dairy creamer, and it's not good news. They found that while the liquid version has a ton of highly processed sugars, the powdered version is even worse. That has trans fats and partially hydrogenated oil, and that's the stuff you want to avoid completely. They also note that sometimes, it might not even show up in the nutritional information, and you have to check the ingredients list to find it. Sneaky!

Everyday Health looked at how they can get away with that, and essentially, the serving size is so small that the fat content falls below the threshold for what legally needs to be listed. It still adds up, though, along with the calories. Before you know it, you're adding a few grams of fat and as many as 50 calories to a single cup. Not bad? Now multiply that by how many cups you drink, and you'll find you're approaching McDonald's hamburger-territory — just with your morning coffee. 

Aromatherapy is all the rage, and regardless of how much or how little you believe essential oils do, there's one thing that isn't up for debate: you shouldn't be adding them to your drinks.

The American College of Healthcare Sciences says ingesting many oils just isn't safe — no matter what the dose — and can result in a phone call to poison control. Even the few essential oils that are safe for human consumption come with a whole series of caveats, and need to be administered by a clinical aromatherapist. They're the only ones that are going to be able to correctly prescribe the right dosage and make sure it's actually necessary — because most of the time it's not.

The National Capital Poison Center gives some excellent examples of how dangerous adding these to your drinks can be. While peppermint can help sooth gastrointestinal distress, other forms of mint — like pennyroyal — will devastate your liver. They recommend just not swallowing any of it, and calling poison control in case of an accident.

When bubble tea hit the scene — and social media — it was all the rage. It was fun, colorful, and it had the word "tea" in it, so you could feel justified in making a wise drink choice. Only there's a problem, and a huge part of what makes bubble tea unhealthy... are those bubbles.

They're tapioca pearls, and they're the same thing tapioca pudding comes from. (Remember that?) It might be all-natural, but this is a case where that doesn't mean the same as healthy. Reader's Digest notes those little pearls are just orbs of starch extracted from cassava root, a vegetable grown in South Africa. They're essentially just little bundles of carbs, without all the vitamins and minerals that comes when you get your carbs from other places, like whole grain wheat bread.

Then, you'll have to consider that when they're prepared, they're often boiled in sugar for as much three hours. Just how much sugar varies, but a quarter cup of pearls added to your bubble tea can raise the calorie count of your drink by at least 160 calories. Not so healthy now, is it?

No one likes having the same old thing every single morning, and flavor shots or syrups can seem like a great way to switch up your daily cup of joe. But Prevention calls flavor shots one of the worst things you can add to your coffee, just because there's an almost unthinkable amount of sugar in just one squirt of the stuff. If you head to Starbucks and ask for a flavor shot in your coffee, you're getting about an ounce of syrupy sweetness. That serving size of most popular syrups — like Torani — contains a whopping 19 grams of sugar and not much else. Yikes!

But, you say, you can get the sugar-free ones. There's a problem here, too; studies like a recent one from the University of Sydney (via Scientific American) have found sugar-free alternatives actually increase appetite, cravings, and ultimately lead to people eating more calories to try to satisfy those cravings. So, look at it this way — you might be paying for your sugar-free decisions come lunch-time (if you can make it until then).

Picture this: it's a warm, sunny day, you're hanging out in the backyard, and you grab a Corona. You put a lime wedge in it, right? You absolutely shouldn't, because it's more dangerous than you think (via Slate).

What they're not showing in all those Corona commercials is a condition called phytophotodermatitis, and it's caused when sunlight activates a chemical found in limes. When you squeeze the limes outside and the lime juice gets on your skin, it reacts with UV rays from the sun and causes skin cells to rupture. And that, in turn, causes all kinds of skin problems of varying severity.

In fact, there's a good chance it's already happened to you and you might not have recognized it for what it really is. Symptoms can easily be mistaken for another skin condition, and include pigmentation, redness, blistering, inflammation, and soreness, similar to a mild burn or sunburn. It can take a few days to appear, the discomfort lasts for up to a week, and if you've ever noticed a burn that turns brown and hangs around for months, those are actually sings of this whole different type of lime disease.

It's pretty common to be asked if you'd like a slice of lemon in your water, and it seems like a good idea. Ask yourself this, though: is it worth the risk of getting sick?

If a 2007 study from the Journal of Environmental Health is any indication, you have about a 50/50 chance of getting some bacteria with your lemon. They sampled 21 different restaurants over the course of 43 visits, and 53 percent of lemon samples had bacteria — including things like Enterococci, which St. James Hospital says is commonly found in a person's gut and can cause major infections in someone who has a compromised immune system.

They also say lemon's natural antibacterial properties aren't enough to fight off most of the contamination, and neither is alcohol. A study from the Annals of Microbiology (via Men's Health) looked at 52 different types of bacteria and whether or not they survive after being added to a drink. The short answer is that many do, and that whiskey was the only drink that showed an ability to kill off bacteria. The moral of the story? Skip the lemon (or order the whiskey).