Pushing her meal cart into the hospital room, a research assistant hands out tall glasses of reddish-pink liquid, along with a gentle warning: \u201cRemember, you guys have to finish all your Kool-Aid.\u201d<\/p>\n
One by one, young volunteers chug down their drinks, each carefully calibrated to contain a mix of water, flavoring and a precisely calibrated solution of high fructose corn syrup: 55% fructose, 45% glucose.<\/p>\n
The participants are part of an ongoing study run by Kimber Stanhope, a nutritional biologist at the University of California, Davis. Volunteers agree to spend several weeks as lab rats: their food carefully measured, their bodies subjected to a steady dose of scans and blood tests. At first, each volunteer receives meals with no added sugars. But then, the sweetened drinks<\/strong> start showing up.<\/p>\n In one part of the study, volunteers drank three of the sweet concoctions daily \u2014 about 500 calories of added sugar, or 25% of all calories for the adult women in the study. Within just two weeks, their blood chemistry was out of whack. In one striking change, the volunteers had elevated levels of LDL cholesterol, a risk factor for heart disease.<\/p>\n While force-feeding junk food may sound extreme, this controlled diet is not so far from the real world. A 20-ounce regular soda contains 227 calories, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). That single drink is more than 10% of the total calories an adult woman needs to maintain a healthy weight, according to USDA diet guidelines. Meanwhile, about 1 in 4 Americans gets at least 200 calories a day from sugary drinks. These numbers, along with work like Stanhope\u2019s, gives ammunition to doctors and public health officials who say soda should be treated as public health enemy No. 1.<\/p>\n \u201cSoft drinks and sugar-containing beverages are the low hanging fruit in public health today,\u201d says Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center, at Children\u2019s Hospital in Boston. \u201cMany children are consuming 300 calories per day or more, just in sugar-containing beverages. Compare the challenge of giving up three glasses of sugary beverages, versus getting them to do two hours of moderate physical activity.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you switch from Coke to water, that\u2019s easy,\u201d says Elizabeth Mayer-Davis, a professor at the University of North Carolina and a recent president of the American Diabetes Association. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to make big complicated changes in how you cook, and shop, and all that. And the number of calories you can save, can be substantial.\u201d<\/p>\nSoft drinks: Public enemy No 1. in obesity fight?<\/h3>\n
Soft drinks: Public enemy No 1. in obesity fight?<\/h2>\n