Sugar Shock

Soft drinks have overtaken white bread as the main source of calories in the U.S. diet...

[Soft Drinks as Top Calorie Culprit, ScienceNews Week of June 18, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 25

Ugh.

Odilia Bermudez, from Tufts University, studied data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999–2000, for nearly 1000 adults. She discovered that two-thirds of the people in the survey drink more than twenty ounces of sweetened beverages (sodas and fruit drinks containing less than 10 percent fruit juice) a day, on average. That's a lot of liquid sugar.

The drinks represented 14 percent of these adults' total daily energy intake. "For the nutrition world, that's an extremely high value," Bermudez says.

...10 years ago, white bread was the mainstay of the U.S. diet—at an energy contribution of only 5 to 7 percent. Before the 1990s, sodas and fruit drinks provided only about 5 percent of the average person's daily calorie load....
...
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.

Rich and I drink perhaps as many as two sugared soft drinks a month. Rich likes a canned peach tea; I like ginger ale; we'll occasionally split a grapefruit soda. When we do buy fruit juice, it's 100% juice.

The South Beach diet (and similar research) has convinced us that we should watch out for sugar and "empty" calories, especially in liquid form. But we've both, always, mostly favored water or tea (hot or iced, unsweetened). Apparently we're more unusual than we suspected.

"[most] dieticians are pretty creeped out" by new data on the typical intake of sweetened drinks, Murray says. "I can't think of too many of them who think there's a good side to that level of consumption. It's just too much."

Sugar Shock ( in category In The News ) - posted at Sun, 19 Jun, 08:37 Pacific | «e»