“if you need a study to tell you sugar water is bad for you than you are probably dumb.”
LOL – I didn’t write that, just so you know. It’s one of the comments posted in response to this article in the Sacramento Bee.
A sweeping statewide study released today points to soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages as one of the main reasons why we are fat.
“For the first time, we have strong scientific evidence that soda is one of the – if not the largest – contributors to the obesity epidemic,” Dr. Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, said Wednesday.
…”Bubbling Over: Soda Consumption and Its Link to Obesity in California” – a joint effort by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research – interviewed 42,000 Californians of all ages.
…The study found that 24 percent of adults drink one or more non-diet sodas a day, and these adults are 27 percent more likely to be overweight.
The results for children were worse, researchers said. Sixty-two percent of adolescents ages 12 to 17 and 41 percent of children ages 2 to 11 imbibe at least one sugar-sweetened drink a day.
Soda is pretty ubiquitous. I can recall when my daughter, Nick, was in elementary school. Her class was doing a unit on nutrition, and the teacher asked the kids to raise their hands if they had soda in the refrigerator at home. Nick was only one of three kids in the class who didn’t raise her hand… and after class, her friends asked her “what do you drink?” They weren’t mocking her – they were genuinely curious. Even worse, she was later asked the same question by her best friend’s mother!
There’s more to the soda problem, unfortunately. Not only are a lot of empty (sugar) calories being consumed, but more nutritious foods may be displaced from the diet as a result. Excess sugar + suboptimal nutrition represents a double whammy. It’s bad enough when the drinkers are adults, but even worse when they’re children. I thought this quote from the story:
“I have seen a number of children who come into the doctor’s office with soda in their baby bottle,” said Dr. Ulfat Shaikh, a pediatrician who works at UC Davis Children Hospital’s weight management clinic. “That, frankly, is frightening.”
was pretty damn chilling.
At any rate, the newspaper commenter has a point: there’s little here that we didn’t already know. But that’s the way the game is played: you need numbers in order to move the public policy ball towards the goal. So good on the State of California: more like this, please!
September 18, 2009
The consumption of soda pop seems almost epidemic these days. It seems like almost everyone is drinking it. If you go to a restaurant that seems to be what most everyone wants to drink. I’m sure at fast food places it’s even worse.
Soda in a baby bottle?????? Whats wrong with these people????
September 18, 2009
Lord only knows…
I recall a shopping trip I made while we were still back in Ohio, where I saw something that just floored me. I was in Meijer, standing in the checkout line w/my groceries – behind a mother and her teenaged daughter. They looked like your perfectly average, suburban, white, middle class types… the only thing that drew my attention to them, was that the daughter (who looked approx. 16) was visibly pregnant – about 7, maybe 8 months along. But she was still quite slender – whatever “baby weight” she’d added appeared to be all baby.
Now, Meijer had a self-serve, soda/slurpee stand at the front of the store – you bought the cups at the checkout stand. And they were the usual “Big Gulp” kinds of cups, too. So while Mom was paying for their groceries, the kid asks her if she could have a soda. And mom says, sure. So she picked out the usual 20 oz. cup and ambled off to the soda fountain.
My jaw damn near hit the floor when I saw that… if that girl was drinking sodas AND staying skinny, what the hell did that say about her overall nutrition? While “eating for two” is often taken to extremes, the reality is that you’re still nourishing a rapidly growing person, and every calorie counts w/respect to eating nutrient-dense food. Sure, I’d expect a teenager to make poor choices (she was pregnant, after all), but what on earth was the deal with her mother??? Where was her brain???
It was one of the few times I’ve ever felt like walking up to someone and slapping them hard, while screaming, “What the F**K is wrong with you?!!!”
September 19, 2009
It sounds like a lot of bad choices went on in that family. I just hope the baby turned out o.k.