New Information In The Soft Drink Debate

By Peter Liu
[Nutrition & Diet]
Do sugary drinks really have a significant effect on teen weight gain?  Peter Liu examines the evidence.
What is the average adolescent’s diet like?  Portions of junk food and soft drinks, coupled with cereal, fruit, meat, dairy, sandwich bread and starchy vegetables every day.  And those portions can be unsettlingly large every single day, all for the sake of growing big and strong.  So it’s easy to question the quality of food that average teens are eating, because let’s face it, most teens don’t really think twice before shoving something tasty into their mouths when they’re hungry and even fewer teens question where their food comes from, how it was manufactured or what the nutritional content is.

So it goes without saying that when thinking about teen weight gain, every part of a teen’s diet should be taken into consideration.  Until now it’s been accepted that soft drinks can contribute greatly to the teen weight gain issue because of the sugar content and the high fructose corn syrup present in many of the drinks adolescents favour.  Recent research into the issue however, is suggesting that these high-sugar soft drinks may not contribute so greatly to adolescent obesity after all, reigniting the debate over the issue of whether or not to tighten restrictions over the manufacture and marketing of sugary soft drinks to kids.

The Debunking Study

Recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is a study out of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis as part of Project EAT (Eating Among Teens).  This was a 5-year study of adolescent eating habits, which recruited 2,294 ethnically diverse teens in the Minneapolis/St. Paul school system and assessed their lifestyle, weight and diet.  Surveys were also done to assess whether teen beverage choices affected weight gain.  One was done between 1998 and 1999, and another between 2003 and 2004.

Interestingly, researchers found that sugary soft drinks didn’t really have any significant impact on weight gain during the 5-year study period by examining how much sugar-sweetened punch, soft drinks and white milk were consumed.  When the teens were 15 years old, 1,289 said they drank at least seven servings of white milk per week, while 1,456 claimed to drink up to six servings of sugar-sweetened punch per week, 1,325 teens drank at least six servings of soft drinks per week and about 1,300 teens drank apple or orange juice six times a week.

Weight-Tested

Researchers found an association between diet soft drinks and weight gain, but after adjusting for dieting practices and parental health concerns over weight loss, that affect disappeared, suggesting the effect depended on how teens dieted, as opposed to the amount of soda they drank.  The research team also found a positive association between drinking white milk and weight loss, where teens who drank little to no white milk gained weight, with the opposite effect for teens who regularly drank servings of white milk per week.
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