Kids Too Sweet on Soft Drinks

That's leading to some unhealthy eating habits

FRIDAY, Aug. 30, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- In the same week that the nation's second-largest school district banned soft drinks on campus, a new study reports that typical grade-school kids drink an average of one can of soda a day.

The researchers also found children who drank the most soda were less likely to eat fruits and vegetables.

It's not clear if soft-drink consumption leads to poor diets or the other way around.

"But the bottom line is we need to pay a lot more attention to enabling kids to consider more healthy beverage selections," says study co-author Karen Weber Cullen, a registered dietician and an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine.

Americans, predictably, are major consumers of soft drinks. The average person consumed 55.9 gallons of soft drinks and 6.1 gallons of sweetened fruit drinks in 1999, according to Beverage World.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles school system decided to fight back. The school board voted to ban the sale of soft drinks on all campuses starting in January 2004.

Cullen and her colleagues surveyed 504 Houston schoolchildren about their eating and drinking habits. The kids were in fourth, fifth and sixth grades.

The purpose of the study was to investigate how consumption of soft drinks is related to healthy eating as a whole, Cullen says. Results of the survey appear in the September issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

The children in the study liked sugary drinks. On average, they reported drinking about 20 ounces of beverages other than water per day, and about half were sweetened beverages such as soft drinks and punch.

None of the children reported drinking diet beverages. "That's an easy thing for kids to know," Cullen says. "They may not be able to report how many ounces of meat they had, but they know if they're drinking a Diet Coke."

The kids with the highest consumption levels reported drinking about 20 ounces of soft drinks a day, equal to nearly two regular-sized cans.

Those who drank the most tended to come from the least-educated families, and were more likely to be minorities. They pulled in more calories -- an estimated 330 a day -- from soft drinks. Their diets suffered too, Cullen says.

"Those students were eating twice as much of what we call high-fat vegetables -- french fries, tater tots, items that are far from being a vegetable anymore," she says.

Those students also ate 60 percent less fruit, Cullen says.

"This just highlights the need for everyone to step back and look at what's driving the need for these kids to drink these things instead of water and milk at meals," she says.

Sean McBride, spokesman for the National Soft Drink Association, points out the students surveyed drank an average of only one can a day.

"Our advice to consumers remains as it has been for decades: whether you're a child or an adult, you need to eat a variety of foods in moderation," he says. "Just because you consume soft drinks doesn't necessarily make your diet a poor diet."

What To Do

The American Dietetic Association offers fact sheets on a variety of nutritional issues. Read more on the Surgeon General's new recommendations about obesity.

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