Soft-drink weight

For all the difficulties the health care system presents to Maine, there is one simple way residents could reduce obesity and the diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and cancer associated with it. A study released last week in the British medical journal The Lancet concludes that a soft drink a day gives a child a 60 percent greater chance of becoming obese. Cut out the sugary drinks and reduce obesity. Simple, but hard.

The Lancet study comes from Boston, where researchers at Children’s Hospital and Harvard’s School of Public Health looked at 548 11- and 12-year-olds over 19 months. A primary reason for their interest was that consumption of soft drinks – non-diet soda, Hawaiian Punch, lemonade, Kool-Aid, etc. – had increased significantly in the previous 15 years just as the number of obese children in the United States had doubled. Was there a link between the two?

Researchers David S. Ludwig, Karen E. Peterson and Steven L. Gortmaker found that each additional serving of sugar-sweetened drink increased body mass index and obesity, after adjusting for anthropometric, demographic, dietary and lifestyle variables. There were no similar weight gains for children who stuck with pure fruit juice or diet soda. Once conclusion scientists drew from the study was that because the sugared drinks aren’t particularly filling, the children who consumed them did not compensate for the added calories – a can of regular Coke has 140 – by reducing the amount they ate or drank elsewhere in their diets.

The study is surprising only in that the conclusions about soft drinks are as bad as or worse than dietitians and any number of observant parents had long suspected. Those parents, and parents who weren’t sure about the effects of these drinks, can now tell their kids with confidence that they’d be better off with plenty of glasses of water and the occasional glass of fruit juice. They would save money, too.

And if state and local governments are looking for ways to reduce health care costs, they might wonder why they serve as hosts in public buildings, especially schools, to machines that dispense these drinks. Revenue for their sale, of course, is the short answer, but an interesting follow-up study to the Lancet report would be to look at these revenues vs. the public costs of the increased rate of diseases associated with obesity.

Gov. King began Maine’s latest health care initiatives with the observation that most of the illnesses residents suffered from were self-induced. His administration has tried hard not to become a nag about promoting the basics of good health, but the data on these simple but hard choices are compelling and point to much if not most of the state health care budget. Smoking is an obvious problem and a lack of exercise nearly as clear. To that list, now add soft drinks.