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One Extra Soft Drink A Day
Can Make A Child Obese
MSNBC News Services
http://www.msnbc.com
2-16-1



Instead of drinking milk, water and natural fruit juices, which are healthier and more nutritious, children are consuming more sweetened beverages and getting fatter.
 
The U.S. study, published this week in The Lancet medical journal, says the soft drink-obesity link is independent of the food children eat, how much television or videos they watch and the amount they exercise.
 
Experts, who called the findings "enormously important," have long believed that sweetened drinks were contributing to the rising obesity epidemic among children, but said there has been no reliable evidence of a link.
 
"These are estimates and the study doesn't tell us the importance of soft drinks relative to the other factors that contribute to obesity, but these data suggest that people aren't compensating" for the extra calories by cutting back on eating, said the study's lead investigator, Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Boston Children's Hospital.
 
France Bellisle from France's Institute of Health and Medical Research, said the study provided "convincing" new evidence about the relationship between sugar and weight gain in children.
 
The prevalence of obesity among children in the United States increased by 100 percent between 1980 and 1994.
 
The added weight they are gaining poses a real health risk because childhood obesity leads to adult obesity and chronic health problems such as heart disease and diabetes.
 
STUDY DETAILS
 
The soft drink study involved tracking 548 children aged 11 or 12 from public schools across Massachusetts for two school years until May 1997.
 
The researchers monitored how many sweet drinks the children consumed and changes in their body mass index (BMI), a standard method used to measure body fat.
 
They found that each sugared soft drink the children consumed each day inched their BMI up by 0.18 points.
 
If they increased their daily soft drink intake, each extra soda made them 60 percent more likely to become obese, regardless of how many sodas they were drinking before.
 
Only 7 percent of the children did not change their soft drink intake over the two years. Fifty-seven percent increased their intake, with a quarter of them drinking two or more extra cans a day, the study said.
 
Ludwig and his colleagues found that adolescent boys were the biggest consumers of soft drinks.
 
Soft drinks tracked in the study included regular sodas, Hawaiian Punch, lemonade, Kool-Aid, sweetened iced tea or other sugared fruit drinks.
 
Pure fruit juice intake was also tracked, but that did not account for the effect, the study said.
 
"The odds of becoming obese increased significantly for each additional daily serving of sugar-sweetened drink," the study concluded.
 
An increase in diet soda consumption made the children less likely to become obese.
 
LOADING UP ON SUGAR
 
Dr. Philip James, chairman of the International Obesity Task Force, an independent worldwide scientific organization which was not connected with the study, said the evidence so far indicates that sugar is slightly less fattening than fat, but that sugar in drinks can be deceptive because the beverages are less filling than food.
 
He said one explanation might be that while people tend to eat less at a meal if they have overeaten at a previous sitting, evening out the calories, they don't tend to do that if the extra calories came from drinks. They tend to eat a normal-sized meal despite having loaded up on sugar from soft drinks.
 
"The average teenager is getting 15 to 20 teaspoons a day of added sugar from soft drinks alone. Consumption rates among children have doubled in the last decade," Ludwig said.
 
In a 1998 report on the issue, the U.S. health lobby group Center for Science in the Public Interest called soft drinks "liquid candy."
 
Sugary drinks are not the only cause of the alarming rise in childhood obesity. Studies have shown that children are also less active and eat diets higher in fat than previously.
 
 
 
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