Study links soft drinks to childhood obesity
fairplay.
Study links soft drinks to childhood obesity
LONDON -- An extra soft drink a day gives a child a 60 per
cent greater chance of becoming obese, new research
suggests.
A study published this week in The Lancet medical journal
said the soft drink-obesity link was independent of the food
the children ate, how much television or videos they watched
and the amount that they exercised.
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 programme at Boston
Children's Hospital.
Dr France Bellisle from France's Institute of Health and
Medical Research said the study provided "convincing" new
evidence about the relationship been sugar and fatness in
children.
The number of obese children in the United States doubled
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 per
cent 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 per cent 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 for children who
went from drinking none to one a day.
Only 7 per cent of the children did not change their soft
drink intake over the two years. A total of 57 per cent of
them upped their intake, with a quarter of them drinking two
or more extra cans a day, the study said.
The soft drink industry attacked the findings.
"There are serious problems with this study," said Mr
Richard Adamson, vice-president of scientific and technical
affairs at the US National Soft Drink Association. He argued
that the sample was not a valid cross section of the
American population, and said children in the age group
studied generally experience major changes in their bodies'
shape and size.
Mr Adamson also said there were also too few obese children
in the study to draw any meaningful conclusions.
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.
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 organisation
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, Mr Ludwig said,
adding that the average American teenager today 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 US health lobby group
Centre 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...