Beverage Studies Examine Obesity Connection
A trio of beverage reports out this week all come from different sources, and consider different questions — but there’s a common thread that ties all of them together: obesity.
Two of the studies focus on carbonated soft drinks and other sugary beverages in our nation’s schools. The first compares deliveries of soda and full-sugar beverages to schools in 2004 to those this year. The numbers are down a whopping 95%. The ongoing initiative — headed up by the American Beverage Association (and big manufactures like Coke and Pepsi), the Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association — has stressed 100% juice drinks, teas and flavored waters (though high school-age kids can additionally opt for diet drinks).
The program was introduced formally in 2006, in response to data showing that two-thirds of all Americans, including one in three children, have serious weight problems.
Against that backdrop, a second report unveiled at a heart disease convention this week shows that the increase in full-sugar beverage consumption has brought about 130,000 cases of diabetes and 14,000 cases of heart disease over the past decade.
The study’s lead author says that the greatest risk right now is to younger people, age 35 years and under.
“No one argues that these drinks are not fine in moderation, but over the past decade their consumption has been on the rise, while consumption of other beverages has declined,” Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, senior study author and an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, was quoted as saying in a Reuters story. more






