Soft drink consumption is the leading cause of Obesity in the US--break the Coke Habit Diet!
Julia Havey
September 14, 2006
If there were any doubt left, a Harvard School of Public Health review of 40 years of scientific nutritional studies implicates soft drinks as a major factor in the nation's obesity epidemic.
That message does seem to be getting through in some modest degree, with consumption of carbonated soft drinks having peaked in 1998 at an astonishing 56.1 gallons per person per year. But no one should make too much of that. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), enough soda pop is produced annually to provide every man, woman and child in America 557 12-ounce cans of the stuff, or about 52.4 gallons each. And, if that statistic doesn't impress you, think of this, the 557 12-ounce cans isn't even enough to get a baseball glove in the Drink, Choose, Live contest that Coca-Cola is holding! You need 680 or so to win a ball glove and only 50,000 to win a used couch! What a farce! What a gross lack of corporate responsiblity to their customers! See
www.DrinkChooseLive.com for more info on Coca huge deception.
Regular soft drinks today are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup almost entirely, the introduction of which in the 1970s has been tied to the explosion of overweight people in America in at least one study, which appeared in the April 2004 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. A characteristic of fructose is that it does not affect appetite. One has no sense of being satiated in consuming fructose-sweetened drinks, encouraging overconsumption.
An important related factor in the incredible increase in the consumption of soft drinks over the past 25 years is that it decreases the consumption of more beneficial drinks, particularly milk. According to CSPI: "In 1977-78, boys consumed more than twice as much milk as soft drinks, and girls consumed 50 percent more milk than soft drinks. By 1994-96, both boys and girls consumed twice as much soda pop as milk." By substituting soft drinks for milk, today's children are lowering their intake of numerous vitamins, minerals and dietary fiber.
In addition to putting heavy consumers of soft drinks at higher risk of osteoporosis, it also puts them at greater risk to tooth decay and dental erosion.
An agreement with the nation's largest soft-drink producers brokered earlier this year by former President Clinton will phase out vending machines in schools offering their highly sweetened products over the next three years. That will put an end to the bizarre practice of school districts making money off of selling unhealthy products to their students, even as many schools were curtailing or eliminating physical education. Hey--if THAT sounds even remotely bizzare to you, try this WHY does it take THREE years to "phase" out the unhealthy crap they are selling our kids? When the machine is empty, you restock it with Dansai water! You can still take our children's money Coca-Cola, and the schools can still benefit but the kids won't suffer in the meantime!
But the responsibility for monitoring children's consumption of soft drinks falls squarely on parents, who should know that the Harvard study found that drinking one can of soda a day can add 15 pounds in body weight in a year's time. Sweeteners are the source of one-third of carbohydrate calories in the American diet, according to the study, and half of that comes from beverages.
And substituting diet soda for regular soda may not help, according to researchers at the University of Texas San Antonio.
The ridiculous thinking that an "occasional soda isn't going to hurt anyone" needs to stop immediately. NO ONE would argue and say "occasional heroine isn't going to hurt anyone"! Well, we live in a day and age where more people have health problems brought on by drinking Coke than doing Coke! Making it a regular habit risks not just weight gain, but also all the unhealthy baggage that comes with putting on the pounds. But from the look of an average American crowd, too few of us have gotten the message and responded accordingly.
Far too few of us! Obesity is a bigger problem than we realize or admit!
Harvard also states that Obesity is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, causing some 2.6 million deaths worldwide each year. In the U.S., survey data on obesity on a national and state level is obtained using information gathered by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), which uses telephone interviews; national data is also collected using the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which does in-person interviews and follow-up height and weight measurements on people who agree to a clinical exam. Lead author Majid Ezzati , Associate Professor of International Health at HSPH, and his colleagues analyzed and compared the data from the two surveys in order to quantify the level of bias when people self-report their height and weight, especially in a telephone interview.
The prevalence of obesity in the U.S. states has been greatly underestimated. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) analyzed data from health surveys, which are used to estimate obesity levels in states. Because people tend to provide incorrect information about their weight and height, especially in telephone surveys, the researchers concluded that estimates of obesity in individual states have been too low, by more than 50%. Their study, which corrects for misreporting in those surveys, appears in the May 2006 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
According to the head of Preventative Medicine at Yale University, The Vice Busting Diet, the ONLY diet book to correctly identify the three biggest contributors to the Obesity pandemic, also offers a realistic, common sense approach for ridding ones live of them and not only losing weight but keeping it off!
“The advice Julia offers is eminently sensible, definitely doable, and wonderfully empowering. It is also tried and true, the basis for Julia’s own remarkable weight loss success. Healthy, vibrant and 130 lbs lighter than her former self, Julia talks about weight loss—and lasting weight control—not as a hypothetical, but as a journey she knows intimately. When you follow where Julia leads, there is no risk of losing your way, because Julia has walked every step of this walk already!”— Dr. David Katz, Oprah's O Magazine contributor, show guest, Author The Flavor Point Diet and The Way to Eat.
Diet and Obesity 
Linear Mode
