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”.