Haven't Talked About Soda In a While...

The American Heart Association is the latest group to come down on sugary drinks. Some day in our post-apocalyptic, Big Brother-run dystopia, one will likely be unable to buy sugarful soft drinks in 12-ounce cans, since they exceed the daily recommended allowance of sugars. I'm glad I did the right thing and got one of those old fashioned bottles at lunch today. I think those are safe. The enormous Mountain Dew that you get with your Taco Bell - not good.

"'Over the past 30 years, total calorie intake has increased by an average of 150 to 300 calories per day, and approximately 50 percent of this increase comes from liquid calories (primarily sugar-sweetened beverages),' the report reads.

"And daily consumption of sweetened soft drinks rose 70 percent between 1970 and 2000. One 12-ounce (0.35 liter) can of regular soda contains roughly 130 calories, which exceeds a woman's daily discretionary sugar budget."

Full article here on Reuters Health.

This Is Why You're Fat

Did you know this??? I was shocked and I'm not being sarcastic for once. From the New York Times -

How sweet it is! The American diet, that is. While the current recommendation is a maximum intake of eight teaspoons of sugars a day, one 12-ounce can of regular soda (or a 20-ounce bottle of VitaminWater) delivers eight or nine teaspoons. That means you are at or over the limit before you’ve eaten a single cookie or container of fruit-flavored yogurt, or even some commercial tomato soups or salad dressings with added sugars. The result is an average daily intake of more than 20 teaspoons of sweet calories.

That first paragraph says basically all you need to know, but you may read the entire article here, though there is something worth noting in that a Dr. Bray who was contacted during the research for the article recommends drinking diet soda instead of the sugarful kind and asserts that aspartame "has none of the once-feared health effects".

By the way, "This is why you're fat" is a lovely snapshot of Americana that you may find here. I'm still hoping they'll post the Classic Sextuple with cheese that I got for Boden at Wendy's, but it just might not be sickeningly glutenous enough to make it onto such a discriminating website.

Not Just for the Tast of It

Remember that great ad campaign?



"Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels, and elevated blood pressure."

This is likely to be another one of those correlations that is not causal. Read the article in the New York Times.

Cah-lee-faw-ni-a

Those Left Coasters might be annoying sometimes with their preachiness and ballot initiatives, but they do tend to be ahead of the curve, especially on health issues.

Now, from the people who brought you smoking bans... the Sugar Tax. San Francisco's mayor, Gavin Newsom, is proposing a tax on sugary sodas and warning labels for highly caffeinated drinks (like Red Bull, which is now banned in France and about whose contribution to high blood pressure I have written on this blog).

"Newsom says obesity accounts for tens of millions of dollars in city health care costs. He cites a recent San Francisco Health Department survey that found nearly a quarter of the city's 5th, 7th and 9th graders were overweight and that high sugar drinks make up a tenth of a kid's daily calorie count."