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Study:
Soft Drinks Lead to Obesity
By
EMMA ROSS
.c
The Associated Press
LONDON (AP) - An extra soft drink a day gives a child a 60 percent
greater chance of becoming obese, new research suggests.
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.
A common measurement of obesity is the body mass index, or BMI,
which takes into account weight and height. A BMI of 25 means a
person is overweight. The threshold for obesity is a BMI of 30.
For children, experts disagree on what constitutes obesity. Some
believe that, in general, any child with a BMI above the 85th
percentile for age and sex is obese, while others use the 95th
percentile.
The study used the 85th percentile as the threshold for obesity.
By that measure, scientists estimate that 24 percent of American
children are obese. Rates of childhood obesity in Europe are not
as high as in the United States, but are on the rise. Accurate
statistics were not readily available.
The soft drink study involved tracking 548 children aged 11 or 12
from public schools across Massachusetts for two school years
until May 1997.
It found that each sugared soft drink the children were consuming
each day at the beginning of the study contributed 0.18 points to
their BMI.
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. All the children were
already drinking some soft drinks at the beginning of the study,
but the researchers extrapolated that the effect would remain
consistent even if a child went from drinking none to one a day.
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.
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.
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.
In the last 10 years, soft drink consumption has almost doubled
among children in the United States, Ludwig said, adding that the
average American teen-ager consumes 15 to 20 extra teaspoons of
sugar a day just from soda and other sugared drinks.
Half of all Americans and most adolescents consume soft drinks
daily, and most of those are regular, not diet, the study 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.''
Childhood obesity has been linked to later development of
diabetes, heart disease, cancer and arthritis.
AP-NY-02-15-01 2101EST |
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