Pop, obesity link tightened

As public health leaders step up their efforts to temper Americans’ thirst for sugar-sweetened beverages, a new set of published studies has found that removing sugary drinks from kids’ diets slows weight gain in heavy teens and reduces the odds that normal-weight children will become obese.

Although sodas, sports drinks, blended coffees and other high-calorie beverages have long been assumed to play a leading role in the nation’s obesity crisis, these studies are the first to show that consumption of sugary drinks is a direct cause of weight gain, experts said.

For adults, the new research offers the disturbing suggestion that regular consumption of the high-calorie beverages may turn on genetic switches that incline our bodies to becoming fat.

Collectively, the studies leave little doubt that a steady surge in the consumption of soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks has contributed to the near-tripling of the nation’s obesity rate over the last four decades.

“Calories from sugar-sweetened beverages do matter,” Yale University endocrinologist Sonia Caprio wrote in an editorial that accompanied the studies, published online Friday by the New England Journal of Medicine. “The time has come to take action.”

More than 12.5 million American kids and 78 million adults are obese. The 40 years of increasing national girth have paralleled an estimated doubling of calories consumed in drinks sweetened with sugar and its close chemical relative, high-fructose corn syrup.

As public health officials have pondered ways to reduce obesity and the chronic diseases that come with it, they have sharpened their focus on the estimated 222 calories the average American drinks every day in the form of sugary drinks and the like.

“Sugar-sweetened beverages – and ultimately all sugary beverages including juices – are the low-hanging fruit” of the anti-obesity campaign, said University of North Carolina epidemiologist Barry M. Popkin, an obesity expert who tracks American consumption patterns. While sugary drinks are high in calories, they are low in nutrients, he said. What’s more, studies show that people who drink such beverages rarely compensate for their extra calories by reducing intake at meals.

Two of the reports published Friday break new ground in the long-running debate by employing the “gold standard” of biomedical research design: The researchers compared two groups of children who were similar in most respects except that some were randomly selected to drink a sugary beverage each day and some were given an artificially sweetened drink with no calories.

As a result, the findings provide a clear-eyed look at how weight gain is directly influenced by consumption of sugary drinks.

In one of the studies, involving 641 normal-weight children between the ages of 5 and 12, those who drank 8 ounces of sugar-sweetened beverages each day for 18 months gained more than 2 pounds of additional weight and accumulated more fat than their peers who drank artificially sweetened drinks daily.

In the other study, involving 224 ninth- and 10th-graders who were already overweight or obese, those who were supplied with diet drinks and water for one year were more than 4 pounds lighter on average than their peers who continued to drink sugary beverages.

“This research pushes us beyond the potential and suggestive effect of sugar-sweetened beverages on obesity and weight gain and into the realm of very solid science,” said Popkin, who was not involved in the latest studies.

A third study, which linked regular consumption of sugary drinks with genetic differences in adults, may lend support to a growing belief on the part of obesity researchers that some calories matter more than others.