Soda
Sales Go Flat, Industry Fights Back
By Christopher
Wanjek
LiveScience's Bad Medicine Columnist
On
the surface it seemed like a double blow to the
soda industry.
According to data released earlier this month by
Beverage Digest, an industry trade journal, the
number of cases of soda sold in the United States
has declined for the first time in 20 years.
In case your subscription to Beverage Digest has
lapsed, I'll share the figures. The case volume
in 2005 was down 0.7 percent, to a mere 10.2 billion
cases of soda.
A study in the journal Pediatrics this month showed
a direct correlation between weight gain in teenagers
and the consumption of soda and other sugary drinks.
In case your subscription to Pediatrics has lapsed,
too: The study involved 103 teenagers who were regularly
consuming about 350 calories worth of sugary drinks
a day. Half of these kids were given a supply
of bottled water, unsweetened teas and other non-caloric
drinks for 25 weeks. This led to an 82 percent
drop in the consumption of the sugary stuff and
a weight loss of about a pound a month. There
was no weight loss, of course, in the control group.
But before you shed a tear for the soda industry,
keep in mind the underreported fact that while sales
were down last year, sales revenue went up because
the prices were higher. And Coca-Cola and
PepsiCo own over half the bottled water market,
anyway, as well as a considerable amount of the
tea trade.
Nevertheless, the American Beverage Association,
a lobbying group for the beverage industry, quickly
lashed out at the study with this classic, pro-industry
statement: "It stands to reason that
anyone could lose weight if calories from any certain
food or beverage are removed and not replaced by
other calories. Soft drinks are not distinctive
in this regard."
That's right. And how bad is smoking for you,
really, when you replace it with eating dioxin?
This is industry smokescreen and bad medicine.
At issue here is the concept of empty calories.
Sugary drinks offer little nutritional value.
They are liquid candies. A 20-ounce bottle
of regular soda pop contains nearly 70 grams of
sugar, almost five tablespoons. A gram is
about the weight of a raisin. Fill a glass
with 70 raisins, and you'll get an idea of how much
sugar you're ingesting when you drink soda.
Think back to those kids drinking 350 calories a
day. The average person needs about 2,000
to 2,200 calories a day. So more than 15 percent
of these kids' calories are providing no nutrients.
Two 20-ounce Cokes total 500 calories, a quarter
of the quota. This is clearly not conducive
to weight management.
And the American Beverage Association is wrong about
soda being just like any other 350 calories.
Simple, processed sugars in soda, such as corn syrup,
quickly raise blood sugar levels and over-tax the
insulin-producing pancreas, a major cause of diabetes.
The beverage industry should welcome the news of
declining soda sales and adverse health affects.
Bottled filtered water, as opposed to spring water
and mineral water, is municipal tap water filtered
to an unspecified degree (company secret).
This kind of bottled water is soda without the soda,
sold for about the same price. I thought these
guys would have read the soda health report and
drunk it up.
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