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soda

23 Jun 2005

I am loathe to post another story about soda, as the damn coke zero post continues to get flooded with comments (do a google search), but this is too sad not to note:

A recent study notes that softdrinks now account for a larger proportion of Americans’ caloric consumption than anything else:

Odilia Bermudez, PhD, MPH, studied the reported diets of a large nationwide sample of American adults. Among respondents to the 1999-2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), more than two thirds reported drinking enough soda and/or sweet drinks to provide them with a greater proportion of daily calories than any other food. In addition, obesity rates were higher among these sweet drink consumers. Consumers of 100% orange juice and low fat milk, on the other hand, tended to be less overweight, on average.

Science News Online comments:

Dieters may not realize how sugary beverages affect them, because they focus on avoiding calorie-rich solid foods, says Robert Murray of Ohio State University. “Liquid calories like this, I think we tend to just ignore them,” he says.

This is definitely true, but also, perhaps to a lesser extent, a lot of people out there are still guided by the low-fat paradigm. As a result, they acknowledge the calories in drinks like these, but think it’s okay, because after all, it’s “fat free”.

Comments

Doug Orleans — June 23, 2005 at 14:20 · reply

That statistic (“greater proportion of daily calories than any other food”) seems misleading. Does it mean that people get more calories from drinking than eating? Or just that there is no single food that people get more calories from than soda? People generally eat different things in each meal in a day (or even in a week), but have much less variety in what they drink (maybe 2 or 3 different drinks a day, and the same every day).

cwage — June 23, 2005 at 14:26 · reply

The link to the actual study summary linked on that blog goes into a bit of detail:

Among respondents to the 1999-2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), more than two thirds reported drinking enough soda and/or sweet drinks to provide them with a greater proportion of daily calories than any other food.

Erik — June 23, 2005 at 14:34 · reply

I’m with Doug. No doubt there’s some actually scary statistic in the survey, but “greater proportion than any other food” is reminiscent of the “moral values” hoax.

cwage — June 23, 2005 at 14:38 · reply

I don’t get it. What’s not clear about it?

Amanda — June 23, 2005 at 15:00 · reply

That is slightly confusing, but its sort of moot. Because nearly ANY solid food you eat (and count toward your daily calorie allotment) is going to be at least mildly satiating (hunger-wise). I don’t think you can make that arguement for a soda. So regardless of the poor wording on the part of NHANES, the point still remains: quit drinking so many fucking sodas.

But I think that Doug is reading it right and (if I understand correctly) his criticism is most people don’t eat a portion of chicken at every meal as their protein. They’ll have eggs for breakfast, chicken for lunch and beef for dinner for example. But, most will likely have a soda or two at lunch and dinner. Meaning most other food is being “counted”(towards calorie consumption) once where as soda is being counted 3,4,5+ times. So just through sheer volume soda is coming out ahead of any single food, but you are probably not consuming more calories in soda than you are at any given meal. (ALTHOUGH I wouldn’t be suprised to be proven wrong about that!)

Amanda — June 23, 2005 at 15:07 · reply

also there is a blog about us food policy? rawk.

U.S. Food Policy — June 23, 2005 at 15:57 · reply

Cool discussion. On reflection, I think Doug is right that “great portion of calories than any other food” could be misused. In this case, it means that the soda-plus-sweet-drinks category provides more calories than any other category, but falls far short of 50 percent. By combining categories differently, you might get a different leading category. For example, if you treated all meats and fish as one category and broke soda and sweet drinks into separate categories, would you find that meats and fish are the leading category? The reason for concern about soda and sweet drinks is not just that they are the leading category. As Amanda mentioned, there is a feeling that the liquid calories may not be regulated properly by the body and may present a special concern for obesity risk.

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