Article: Public Enemy No. 1: Real or Hype

[smiley]

This article was posted to my local paper today and I found it interesting. It is talking about Soda and Sugar Drinks...

health.heraldtribune.com/2012/06/18/public-health-enemy-no-1-real-or-hype/

Public Health Enemy No. 1: Real or hype?
By Online staff, Herald-Tribune / Monday, June 18, 2012
By DANIEL ENGBER, Slate

“What’s next?” asks the industry-funded Center for Consumer Freedom, in response to a New York City plan to forbid the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces. “Limits on the width of a pizza slice, size of a hamburger or amount of cream cheese on a bagel?”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended his idea, assuring Matt Lauer of the “Today Show” that “we’re not banning you from getting the stuff. … It’s just if you want 32 ounces, the restaurant has to serve it in two glasses. That’s not exactly taking away your freedoms.”

(RELATED STORY: While sodas get the blame, fruit juices may be just as harmful.)

It didn’t take long for the details of this putative public-health measure to dissolve into a super-sized debate. But before we all start pouring it on about the costs of obesity and an apartheid of pleasure, let’s consider the scientific facts — contested or otherwise — that led Bloomberg to propose his soda-size control in the first place.

Would the pint-cup cutoff reduce obesity, or not?

There are two questions here, both of them well-studied by nutritionists and epidemiologists. First, would people eat or drink less if they were served in smaller portions? Second, would they lose weight if they consumed less sugary liquid? The answers seem obvious to most people: yes and YES!

That’s part of what makes it so hard to study the questions. Since we already think that both super-sizing and soda make us fat, the people who avoid super-sized portions and nondiet soda tend to be the same ones who join the gym, eat fish twice per week, and natter on about the joys of kale. It’s tricky to determine which parts of a lifestyle might count the most.

Tricky, but not impossible. There are plenty of data to show that portion sizes have increased over the last 30 years while childhood obesity rates tripled. Once upon a time, a “king-size soft drink” was just 12 ounces.

But sodas and fruit drinks weren’t the only foods that swelled: The energy content of cheeseburgers increased by almost one-quarter, pizza slices jumped by 35 percent, and portions of Mexican food by even more than that.

We know that kids got their junk food in bigger portions in the 1980s and 1990s, and that they got fatter overall. But what’s the rationale for singling out the jumbo soft drinks for government oversight, as opposed to the double-wide pizza and 10-inch burritos? That’s where things get interesting.

The case against soda starts with the idea that the body’s response to beverages differs from its response to solid food. People regulate their caloric intake without thinking. If we eat more at one meal, we’ll go lighter on the next. But for some reason (the mechanism is still unknown), drinks throw this compensatory mechanism out of whack. A sugar-sweetened beverage might give you as much energy as a candy bar or a heap of mashed potatoes, but you’ll be less inclined to account for it with tempered eating down the line.

Quite a few studies have been carried out to see if consumption patterns correlate with changes in body mass index. A 2004 study of more than 50,000 middle-aged women over a span of a decade found that women who starting drinking more sugary beverages midway through the study gained more weight than women who did the opposite. Yet other observational studies have found no evidence that sugar-sweetened drinks are fattening.

The inevitable next step came in 2011, with a paper that tried to review the quality of all this research. The authors gathered 17 omnibus accounts of sugar-sweetened beverage research and tested each one according to a standard template. On average, they said, the papers used just “4 of 11 best practices for an objective and systematic methodology.”

The implication was clear: Research on sugar-sweetened beverages has been so sloppy and vague as to be inconclusive.

Before you throw up your hands in despair, there’s one more set of facts to consider. The 2011 paper was funded by the Coca-Cola Company. A 2008 review that found a “near zero” effect of sugar-sweetened beverages was paid for with a grant from the American Beverage Association, which ended up hiring its senior author to a full-time position.

The scientists who have lined up against the sugary-drink hypothesis are largely the ones with financial links to the beverage industry. And while that’s not proof of corruption — lots of researchers take private money, and there’s evidence of both black-hat and white-hat bias in the obesity literature — their approach does fit a disturbing pattern: By counseling caution and harping on uncertainty, the industry consultants are appealing to a paranoid style in American science that (intentionally or not) serves to stave off government regulation.

But even if you’re inclined to believe the toxic-soda theory, important questions remain. Can targeted interventions to reduce soft-drink consumption really prevent weight gain? Would drinking less soda make everyone healthier, or just some people?

Finally, what would happen if we did nothing at all?

Carbonated soft-drink sales have been in decline since the late 1990s even without a soda tax or size restriction, and a study from last year found that Americans’ intake of added sugar has dropped by almost 25 percent in recent years. Meanwhile, obesity rates seem to be flattening out.

That’s the science. The rest is politics, and money.

[taratru]

I would love to see changes across the board in terms of soda/fruit juice/sugary drinks/even sports drinks - the marketing, the selling, the serving. I think the drinking of calories is ruining us.

[blinkinglight1]

While on the outside this sounds like a good idea....it's all about personal responsibility. If someone wants to drink 32oz of soda, that's their choice and I don't think it's the city's job to restrict them.

[Brit]

Jun 19, 2012 11:21:37 GMT -5 blinkinglight1 said:

While on the outside this sounds like a good idea....it's all about personal responsibility. If someone wants to drink 32oz of soda, that's their choice and I don't think it's the city's job to restrict them.

Exactly. While I would never consume 32oz of soda myself, it still seems like an infringement on rights to me.

[gt7301b]

Jun 19, 2012 11:29:59 GMT -5 Brit said:

Jun 19, 2012 11:21:37 GMT -5 blinkinglight1 said:

While on the outside this sounds like a good idea....it's all about personal responsibility. If someone wants to drink 32oz of soda, that's their choice and I don't think it's the city's job to restrict them.

Exactly. While I would never consume 32oz of soda myself, it still seems like an infringement on rights to me.

This!