It is not just the soft drinks which are loaded with high levels of poisonous chemicals.

Years of indiscriminate use of pesticides in agriculture has contaminated almost everything, from milk and cheese to ice creams, sweets, and chicken, a scientist has said.

However, the carbonated soft drinks should be shunned for being 'doubly dangerous.' "Besides being high in pesticides, they have very poor nutritional value and burden the digestive system," Prof S A Abbasi, senior professor and director, Centre for Pollution Control and Energy Technology at the Pondicherry University, has said.

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Decades of indiscriminate use of pesticides in agriculture, which still continues unabated, as well as laxity in controlling pollution due to automobile exhaust, power plants and chemical industry have contaminated land, water and vegetation with harmful chemicals, he said.

"If any agency chooses to study pesticide levels of milk, cheese, ice creams, sweets, mutton, chicken or vegetables, one can safely forecast that higher than permissible levels of poisonous substances would be found in most of them," he said.

A World Health Organisation study several years back had revealed that pesticide levels even in human milk in India were alarmingly high, Abbasi said.

However, such drinks should be shunned just not for high pesticide content but also because of their poor nutritional value.

They are solutions of unnecessary chemicals, sweetened and carbonated to mask the otherwise tasteless broth.

These drinks impair digestion and burden the liver and the kidney with the job of removing unessential chemicals from the body, he added.