OBESITY - the BIG Deal in the 21st Century
Soda pop can make a person FAT. One very recent, independent, peer-reviewed study demonstrates a strong link between soda consumption and childhood obesity. One researcher stated that it is difficult to "prove" that soda pop actually CAUSES weight gain. Who's behind do you think he was protecting? It seems intuitively obvious to me that the consumption of large amounts of sugar - every day - has to have some impact on a child's weight. You don't need a scientific study to know that, for heaven's sake.

However, they had to keeping searching for proof of the most obvious. The Lancet, a British medical journal, reported the first evidence linking soft drink consumption to childhood obesity. They found that 12-year-olds who drank soft drinks regularly were more likely to be overweight than those who didn't. For each additional daily serving of sugar-sweetened soft drink consumed during the nearly two-year study, the risk of obesity increased 1.6 times. I really wonder who funded that study. Aren't there more important things to investigate?

The study raised the question about a child's level of activity and the weight gain from soda pop. It could be that lazy kids drink pop and get fatter. Well, the researchers looked long and hard at their data and decided - again with a level of brilliance - that drinking soda proved to be "an independent risk factor for obesity." I don't find that to be particularly shocking

The soft drink industry quickly took steps to dispute the findings reported in The Lancet. They claimed that the results were biased because of the characteristics of the studied group. There were 548 youngsters in the study and they were from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. The soft drink company whiners claimed that there were too few Caucasians in the study. The population in general is over 75% Caucasian (almost 90% in the state where the study was conducted - Massachusetts).

Obesity experts, on the other hand, called the Harvard findings important and praised the study for being prospective. In other words, the Harvard researchers spent 19 months following the children, rather than capturing a snapshot of data from just one day. It's considered statistically more valuable to conduct a study over a long period.

I mentioned above that I thought it was nice that a Harvard study has proven what seems to be such an obvious claim (soda pop makes kids fat). William Dietz is the director of the division of nutrition and physical activity at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. He thought the Harvard study was good but, "It's only a single study, and it needs to be repeated". Seems to me to be a stalling tactic at best. I wouldn't need repetitions to convince me that feeding kids a lot of sugar makes them fat. Of course, I'm not a researcher and I don't head up a politically sensitive government office. Maybe I'm the biased one.

If soft drinks do prove to contribute to obesity, how might this happen? Is it simply a matter of drinking in too many calories?

The Harvard study went further to explain that schoolchildren who drank soft drinks also consumed almost 200 more calories per day. Those students who did not drink the calorie-rich soda also consumed fewer overall calories. It seems that sugar-calories in soda pop trick the brain into thinking it needs more calories - even though there are already more than enough in the drink.

Richard Adamson is the soft drink industry's vice president for scientific and technical affairs. He said, "Childhood obesity is the result of many factors. Blaming it on a single factor, including soft drinks, is nutritional nonsense." Of course! However, think about it - if the calories in the pop also increased the number of other calories consumed wouldn't removing the pop reduce the calorie intake by the calories in the pop AND those in the extra food consumed? Sure, the soda pop isn't the ONLY culprit, but removing those calories should go a long way toward reducing a weight problem.