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Soft drink makes kids fat and a new study has shown how much. For every additional glass of sugar-sweetened drink per day, the risk of obesity in children rose by 60 per cent. Here's a big surprise for you... the consumption of soft drinks is associated with obesity in children. Now while that fact might not make the earth move for you, what a group of American researchers have done is quantify the effect. It's important because the numbers of fat children are increasing significantly each year. They followed nearly 600 12-year-olds for a couple of years, monitoring their intake of various foods and their weight and height. Over two years, there was a 10 per cent increase in the level of fatness of the children - quite dramatic really in a short period. And when they controlled for television viewing (a well-known factor in childhood obesity), physical activity and other dietary factors, soft drinks by themselves added extra risk for obesity. For every additional glass of sugar-sweetened drink per day, the risk of obesity rose by 60 per cent, and those children with a high intake at the beginning of the study were those at greatest risk. Changing the children over to diet drinks reduced the chances of obesity by over a half. While the researchers were loathe to firmly say there was a cause-and-effect link here, they did feel that this was a dietary factor which something could be done about fairly easily. And with the booming epidemic in adult diabetes, tied back to childhood obesity, we need to do what we can to keep our kids' weight down without scaring them into anorexia. Most experts say the best techniques are to increase exercise, reduce television viewing and probably reduce time at computers - and now perhaps replacing sugar-loaded drinks with diet products.
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