HealthDay, November 1, 2011
A new report claims that the makers of sugar-laden drinks such as sodas, sports drinks, energy drinks and fruit drinks take direct aim at children, particularly black and Hispanic kids, in their marketing campaigns.
Read the report at: Report slams makers of sugary drinks for targeting kids – USATODAY.com.
]]>September 14, Philly.com, Karen Heller
The offer from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to fund an antiobesity program, financed by the soda industry, just fizzled like so many flat colas.
We have a monstrous obesity problem, and Philadelphia could use the money. But saying no was the obvious choice for the Nutter administration, waging a campaign for healthier diets.
The choice was also right.
“It seems to me that accepting money from the beverage industry to fight obesity would be like taking money from the NRA to fight gun violence or from the tobacco industry for smoking cessations,” Mayor Nutter said. “I mean, it’s ludicrous.”
Instead of blood money, this was fat money.
The funds, part of a $10 million grant from the American Beverage Association, was specifically targeted to government programs. “The city health centers were the only ones being offered this funding, when there are other federally qualified health centers,” said health commissioner Donald Schwarz, a pediatrician and former Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia division chief in adolescent medicine. There was no legal conflict. He checked.
“Taking money from the beverage industry when we are often and several times in conflict, I have to worry about appearances but what I really worry about is substance,” Schwarz said, noting that “if the beverage industry came, as they have in the past, and said, ‘We’ll fund something in exchange for you not introducing a sugary beverage tax in the future,’ this was not appropriate.”
Schwarz made the decision in consultation with Nutter, who keeps a Mountain Dew bottle in his office not as a thirst-quencher but as a political tool, informing visitors that the 20-ounce soda contains the equivalent of 19 packets of sugar.
“It’s really nothing more than fat in a bottle,” Nutter said. “And there’s very little recognition by the industry of the problems and challenges that their product creates.”
The city has become “ground zero in the beverage wars,” noted University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan.
Obesity is a leading contributor to many life-ending illnesses. More than half the city’s children are obese or overweight; in North Central Philadelphia, the rate is a staggering 70 percent. Almost a third of our adults are obese, and one in eight has Type 2 diabetes.
READ MORE: Karen Heller: Offer of soda-industry funds fell flat, as it should have – Philly.com.
]]>
September 12, 2011, CMJ
Health organizations are comparing their battle with makers of sugary beverages to the war they once waged with big tobacco. Advocates for healthy living have run educational campaigns and called for marketing regulations and taxes on high-calorie drinks. The beverage industry, meanwhile, has accused some health departments of launching baseless attacks and has even responded in one jurisdiction with a lawsuit.
Health departments in a number of areas — including Chicago, Illinois; Seattle, Washington; and Chatham-Kent, Ontario — have launched public health campaigns that expose the high-calorie count in soda, sports drinks and some juices. One particularly graphic ad, sponsored by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, shows cola being poured into a glass and turning into fat.
In response to the ads, the American Beverage Association has filed requests under freedom of information legislation with several health departments and is suing the New York City health department for allegedly holding back email correspondence that details the decision-making process that led to the ads.
“These campaigns are really off-putting,” says Chris Gindlesperger, spokesperson for the association. “They’re being paid for with tax payer dollars, at a time when…cities and states aren’t able to meet their financial obligations.”
By “singling out” sugary drinks, Gindlesperger argues, the campaigns simplify nutrition and weight gain and do the public a disservice. “These beverages only make up 7% of the average American’s diet,” he says.
But Michael Jacobson, cofounder and secretary of the board of directors of the Center for Science in the Public Interest based in Washington, DC, points out that “the 7% figure averages in a lot of little old ladies who don’t drink any soda. But teenagers are actually getting 20% of their calories from soft drinks,” he say. In California, for instance, 41% of children aged 2–11 drink at least one soda a day (http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1fj3h5cj;jsessionid=32D3B5FB5A4EFC44B0C4AF3B9FFF4132).
In addition to educational campaigns, many organizations, including the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, based in Davis, California, and the Vancouver, British Columbia-based Childhood Obesity Foundation, are calling for a tax on sugary drinks. Harold Goldstein, executive director of the California center, says a penny-per-ounce tax could cut sugary drink consumption in the same way taxes reduced smoking, and the revenue could be funneled into exercise programs in schools and health care. And he doesn’t buy Gindlesperger’s claim that a tax would have the greatest financial impact on low-income families.
“This is after decades of spending marketing dollars to target low-income communities and communities of colour that now have the highest obesity rates,” says Goldstein, who argues PepsiCo’s recent “We Inspire” campaign, featuring rapper and actress Queen Latifah among others, was specifically aimed at getting African-American mothers to consume more soda.
Gindlesperger, however, argues that industry representatives are concerned about obesity rates and have voluntarily “cut calories in schools by 88%” by replacing soft drinks with juice, water and milk. In addition, the American Beverage Association’s “Clear on Calories” initiative will see the Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, the Dr Pepper Snapple Group and other companies move calorie counts from the back to the front of their labels. As well, Gindlesperger points out, some makers of soft drinks have voluntarily ceased marketing their high-calorie, low-nutrient beverages to children under 12 years of age.
Goldstein disagrees, noting that marketing comes in many forms. “They may not use cartoons like Camel cigarettes did, but they market in shows that kids watch, like American Idol,” where judges are seen drinking a sweetened beverage.
Goldstein and Jacobson both say marketing restrictions should be mandatory rather than voluntary, and that sugary drinks shouldn’t be available in areas children frequent. Goldstein adds that the drinks should be prohibited in all public places, including community centres and sports arenas. “At the very least, cities, counties and states shouldn’t be in the business of selling sugary drinks,” he says.
Until then, the billions of dollars spent on beverage marketing will give the industry a much greater advantage over campaigns of the “Rethink Your Drink” variety, which altogether consumed funding in the low millions, says Joe Prickitt, director of the Network for a Healthy California. “It’s really not a level playing field for children or adults in terms of the messaging that’s out there.”
CMAJ: Soda war heats up.
September 6, 2011, Boston Globe, Kay Lazar
Hoping to blunt the pervasive reach of sugary drinks, Boston officials today unveiled a public awareness campaign that urges residents to reduce their consumption of the beverages , which public health specialists link to rising obesity rates and higher health care costs.
The campaign, which will include a media blitz of the city, comes a month before an executive order by Mayor Thomas M. Menino takes effect, phasing out the sale, advertising, and promotion of sugar-sweetened beverages in all municipal buildings.
“We are in the midst of a health crisis in the city of Boston,” Menino said at a City Hall press conference this morning. “Forty percent of the kids in Boston Public Schools are overweight or obese.”
The $1 million federally-funded campaign will blanket Boston with TV, radio, MBTA, web, print, and billboard advertisements . The program will particularly target black and Latino neighborhoods, including Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan, where obesity rates are much higher, officials said. Some of the ads will be in Spanish and air on urban hip hop radio and TV stations. They will run for about six weeks.
About 63 percent of black and 51 percent of Latino adults in Boston are considered overweight or obese, compared with 49 percent of white adults, according to the Boston Public Health Commission.
The media campaign is aimed at two age groups — parents who do the bulk of the household grocery shopping, and teens and young adults who consume more soda, energy drinks, and other sugary beverages than any other age group, according to a US government nutrition study.
The ads aimed at parents feature children in various activities, roller blading with helmet and protective pads, or strapped into a car seat. Near them is a stash of empty cola and other sweetened drink bottles.
“You do so much to protect them. But, maybe, you never realized how much these could hurt them,” the ad states. “After all, your kids are sweet enough already.”
The other ads, dubbed “Don’t get smacked by Fat” and developed by a panel of teens who worked with the Boston Public Health Commission, show young adults sipping sugary drinks while a neon yellow glob of fat is soaring through the air and about to hit them.
“Calories from sugary drinks can cause obesity and Type 2 diabetes,” the ads state.
Brandon DaGraca, a 16-year-old Boston Arts Academy junior and member of the youth council working with health officials on the anti-sugar campaign, said many young people don‘t understand how insidious sugar is.
“A lot of teens in Boston aren’t taught the important stuff,” DaGraca said. “What I hear from my peers is, ‘You eat too much, you gain weight.’ But it can also be sugar-sweetened beverages.”
A typical 20-ounce soda contains about 16 teaspoons of sugar and 250 calories, according to the Boston Public Health Commission.
To burn off just these calories, the average adult would have to walk at a brisk pace for 45 minutes, the commission’s data show.
]]>
August 30, 2011, CBS News, David Freeman
Has the time come for school districts across the nation to just say no to sugary drinks?
That’s what some experts are saying in light of new research suggesting that Boston’s controversial ban on sugar-sweetened beverages has succeeded in limiting kids’ consumption of soft drinks and sports beverages – which have been identified as major contributors to the nation’s epidemic of childhood obesity.
A study published in the CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease shows that high-school students in the city averaged 1.38 servings of sugar-sweetened beverage per day in 2006. That was down from 1.71 servings a day in 2004, when the ban – which blocks schools from selling the beverages on campus – went into effect.
The reduced consumption of the high-calorie drinks translates into about 45 fewer calories a day. Previous studies have shown that the average teenager consumes about 300 calories a day from sugar-sweetened beverages.
“This study shows that a very simple policy change can have a big impact on student behavior,” lead author Dr. Angie Cradock, a senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, said in a written statement released by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the study. “It also shows that when students couldn’t get these unhealthy beverages in school, they didn’t necessarily buy them elsewhere.”
The CDC has been a champion of limiting kids’ access to sodas, pointing out that rates of childhood obesity have tripled in recent years as children’s consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages has been rising.
But bans on the sale of products that are both popular and perfectly legal? Isn’t that an example of government policies of the sort that some have derided as “nanny state nonsense?”
If the Boston ban is an example of nanny state policies, “Let’s hear a round of applause for the nanny state,” Dr. Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, told CBS News in an email. “Do I think soft drinks should be banned from schools? You bet. Nobody is stopping parents from giving their kids sodas at home, advisable as that might be.”
via Do school soda bans curb obesity in kids? What Boston study shows – HealthPop – CBS News.
]]>August 31, 2011, USA Today, Nancy Hellmich
Teens who drink soda, energy drinks and other sugary beverages are guzzling about 327 calories a day from them, which is equal to about 2½ cans of cola, new government data shows.
And people ages 20-39 who drink sugary beverages consume 336 calories a day from them.
Some people are getting a lot of their daily calories from these drinks, says Cynthia Ogden, an epidemiologist with the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted this survey.
The latest analysis shows that half of people in the USA drink sugary beverages on any given day; and about 25% consume at least 200 calories a day from them.
About 5% of people ages 2 and older consume at least 567 calories a day from these types of drinks, which is equal to more than four 12-ounce cans of cola.
This issue continues to be a national problem, nutrition experts say. “Sugar-sweetened beverages are the number one single source of calories in the American diet and account for about half of all added sugars that people consume,” says Rachel Johnson, a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association and a nutrition professor at the University of Vermont.
“Most Americans don’t have much room in their diets for a completely nutrient-void beverage.”
A high intake of added sugars increases the risk of obesity, high blood pressure and other risk factors for heart disease and stroke, she says. “One recent study showed that drinking more than one sugar-sweetened beverage a day increases your risk of high blood pressure.”
Ogden says that “the reason we are interested in sugary drinks is they are associated with a variety of conditions including obesity and type 2 diabetes.”
Barry Popkin, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and one of the nation’s top experts on beverage consumption, says the consumption of super-caffeinated energy drinks, especially among teens and young adults, is skyrocketing. “These are empty calories with no health benefits.”
The new findings are from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is considered the gold standard for evaluating food and beverage habits because the data is from in-person interviews about dietary habits. These results are from more than 17,000 interviews conducted from 2005 to 2008.
The drinks with added sugar in this analysis included sodas, energy drinks, sports drinks, fruit drinks and sweetened bottled waters. Not included: Diet drinks, coffee, 100% fruit juice, sweetened teas and flavored milks.
Among the findings:
•Males consume more sugary beverages than females.
•Teens and young adults consume more than other age groups.
•Black and Mexican-American adults drink more calories from these beverages than whites.
•People in lower socio-economic groups consume more calories from them than higher-income people.
•52% of sugary drinks are consumed at home; 48% away from home.
The heart association advises people to consume no more than 36 ounces or about 450 calories from sugary beverages a week. “It’s better if you can avoid them altogether and instead consume water, fat-free or 1% fat milk, 100% fruit juice and low-sodium vegetable juices,” Johnson says.
On Wednesday, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the heart association, the American Diabetes Association, other leading health groups and several major city public health departments announced a new public awareness campaign, Life’s Sweeter with Fewer Sugary Drinks, (fewersugarydrinks.org) to reduce the consumption of these types of beverages.
“We want to make it part of conventional thinking that soda and other sugary beverages are acceptable as an occasional treat but not day-in and day-out in such large quantities,” says Michael Jacobson, CSPI’s executive director.
Christopher Gindlesperger, director of communications for the American Beverage Association, points out that another recent government study shows that sugar-sweetened beverages are playing a declining role in the American diet, even as obesity is increasing.
“People are drinking fewer full-calorie, sugar-sweetened beverages due to industry innovation in bringing no and low-calorie beverages to the market.”
via Sugary drinks add 300 calories a day to youths diets – USATODAY.com.
]]>
July 28, 2011, Reuters
Americans downed nearly a quarter less added sugar in 2008 than they did nine years earlier, a new report concludes.
The drop is largely due to a decrease in the amount of sugar-sweetened soda that people drank.
“We were surprised to see that there was a substantial reduction over the years,” said Dr. Jean Welsh, a researcher at Emory University in Atlanta and the lead author of the report.
Although the reasons for the dip are still murky, she said a big push by the government and private organizations to alert consumers to the potential health hazards of sugar, obesity in particular, might have played a role.
Welsh and her colleagues used national surveys of more than 40,000 people’s diets collected over a decade by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The researchers calculated from the responses how much added sugar, that is, extra sugar used to sweeten food, people ate. Sugar that is originally a part of a food, such as the fructose in an apple, was not included.
Between 1999 and 2000, there was about 100 grams, or 3.5 ounces, of added sugar in a typical person’s daily diet. By 2007 to 2008, the number was 77 grams, or 2.7 ounces.
That corresponds to a drop from 18 percent to 14.6 percent of people’s total calorie intake.
“That’s good to see, but it’s still too high,” Welsh told Reuters Health. “All our discretionary calories shouldn’t exceed five to 15 percent of our calories, and we’re consuming that much in just added sugar.”
Two-thirds of the decrease was due to people chugging fewer sweetened beverages, according to the study, which was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
The report notes that in the early 2000s, schools began to limit sugar-sweetened drinks for students, and low-carb diets for adults became more popular.
Dr. Barry Popkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the recession that began in late 2007 also sparked a change in the food people bought
“They all shifted toward cheaper goods, and shifted down the calories they bought,” he told Reuters Health.
Still, Popkin, who was not involved in the new work, added that the survey might not tell the entire sugar story.
Fruit juice and fruit juice concentrate are also used to sweeten foods and drinks, he said, but are not included in survey data on added sugar.
“Fruit juice concentrate is just another sugar. It’s deceiving to think this is a long term trend, and to interpret while ignoring fruit juice concentrate and fruit juice,” Popkin said.
Energy drinks were the one source of added sugar in people’s diets that increased from 1999 to 2008, although they still only make up a small part of the total calories.
The trend for energy drinks in the future “will be interesting to watch,” said Welsh.
via Americans Cut Back on Sugar-Sweetened Soda, Survey Says – FoxNews.com.
]]>
June 17, 2011, ABC news/Medpage Today, Kristina Fiore
Although high school students report drinking plenty of water, milk, and real fruit juice, they still gulp down more sugar-sweetened beverages than is probably good for them, CDC researchers found.
Nearly three-quarters (72.4 percent) of the teens who responded to a national survey said they drank at least one glass of water a day over the preceding seven days, Nancy Brener of the CDC and colleagues reported in the June 17 issue of Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report.
Among the 11,429 survey respondents, 42 percent had at least one glass of milk a day, and 30.2 percent drank 100 percent fruit juice.
“These are healthful beverages, and milk and 100 percent fruit juice are sources of key nutrients,” Brener and colleagues wrote.
But, 24.3 percent of the teens reported having a soda every day, 16.1 percent said they had a sports drink daily, and 16.9 percent said they drank another type of sugar-sweetened beverage every day.
For their study, the researchers assessed data from the National Youth Physical Activity and Nutrition Study (NYPANS), a school-based survey among a nationally representative sample of teens in grades 9 through 12.
Among the respondents, boys were more likely report drinking milk and whole fruit juices than girls, and whites were more likely than blacks and Hispanics to have water and milk every day — although whites were less likely than the others to drink 100 percent fruit juice every day.
Boys and blacks were also more likely to drink soda and sports drinks than girls and white or Hispanic teens. Smaller percentages of students reported drinking more than one sugary drink a day: 15.6 percent had at least two cans of soda per day, 9.2 percent had at least two sports drinks, and 9.8 percent had two or more helpings of other sugar-sweetened beverages daily.
Coffee and tea were further down the consumption ladder — just 14.8 percent of students reported drinking these hot beverages at least once a day.
Diet drinks were even less popular, with 7.1 percent reporting that they drank diet soda every day.
And energy drinks were less popular still, with just 5 percent of respondents saying they drank them every day. Brener and colleagues noted that the study was limited by its reliance on self-reported data, and is not generalizable beyond children who attend public or private high schools.
They also cautioned that their report shows a lower intake of sugary drinks and a higher consumption of whole fruit juice than other data, particularly those from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Still, they said schools and parents alike should limit intake of sugar-sweetened drinks among all teens “while ensuring their access to more healthful beverages.”
They also called for targeted efforts to reduce consumption among males and black teens, since intake of soda and sports drinks was highest among those groups.
via Many Teens Drink Soda Daily, But Consume Healthy Beverages Too – ABC News.
For more information about healthy beverages, visit 
]]>