A man returning home from an evening's kangaroo shooting, possibly a common entertainment in Australia where this case occured, collapsed with lung paralysis. He was rushed to the emergency room where he had to be intubated and mechanically ventilated in hospital. The cause? Not chasing after furry hoppers but three years of sloshing back 4 to 10 liters of cola a day.

Apparently too much caffeine, fructose and glucose - all common cola ingredients - can lower blood potassium levels which can then result in anything from mild muscular weakness to paralysis.

Since there probably aren't too many kangaroo hunters in the greater Washington DC area, you may wonder what this has to do with you. Dr Clifford Packer of Ohio's Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Centre reports that from 1999 to 2002, "several million US teenagers were consuming two or more litres [of cola] per day".

He said with "aggressive mass marketing, super-sizing of soft drinks, and the effects of caffeine tolerance and dependence, there is very little doubt that tens of millions of people in industrialised countries drink at least 2–3 litres of cola per day".

Heavy cola drinkers may escape the condition suffered by the Ozzie hunter. But sugar-sweetened soft drinks, as the good doctor points out, "have been shown to cause obesity, type 2 diabetes, dental decay and metabolic syndrome", along with increasing the risk for osteoporosis, gout, gastroesophageal reflux disease, hypovitaminosis C, albuminuria and chronic kidney disease (CKD). "Case reports have linked soft drinks with secondary hyperparathyroidism, oesophageal perforation, haematuria, swallow syncope, pseudoporphyria, tongue erosions, hyponatraemia and gastritis," says Dr Packer. I've no idea what those are - aside from the tongue business - but they don't sound like a day off work.

On the upside, remember dropping filthy pennies into a glass of Coca-Cola overnight and coming down to find them a gleaming cean copper in the morning? Apparently there are a few cases reported where Coca-Cola dissolved phytobezoars. Which are little lumps of poorly digested fruit and vegetable fibres found in the alimentary tract...Cheers.