24th April 2004
LONDON (Reuters) - Ditching fizzy drinks could help to prevent childhood obesity, researchers said on Friday.
Obesity is a growing
problem in children. Researchers at the Bournemouth Diabetes and
Endocrine Center in southern England found that just cutting down on
carbonated drinks limited children's obesity rates."The message was 'Ditch the fizz'," Dr. David Kerr, the head of the research team, said in an interview.
Rather than targeting multiple areas such as food, drink and exercise to prevent childhood obesity, Kerr and his team decided to focus on just one--carbonated drinks. Fizzy drinks contain large amounts of sugar that are rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream. If the child doesn't use it up it gets stored as fat.
"We thought if we could persuade children to reduce their consumption of fizzy drinks it would go some way to prevent them becoming overweight or obese," Kerr explained. It did.
In a study of 650 schoolchildren, ages 7 to 11, Kerr and his team said half of the youngsters cut their consumption of fizzy drinks by half a glass a day, about 250 mL (9 ounces). The other half, a control group, drank about 0.2 glasses more a day in addition to their average of about two glasses every three days.
By the end of the school year the percentage of overweight and obese children in the control group rose by 7.6 percent but fell 0.2 percent in the children who cut fizzy drinks. "This was is a cheap intervention, thoroughly enjoyed by the children. We think it should be rolled out," said Kerr, whose findings are reported online by the British Medical Journal.
It doesn't take a major starvation diet to prevent people getting overweight or obese. This has huge implications for public health."
Instead of consuming carbonated drinks, the children were encouraged to drink diluted fruit juices or water. "This study supports the fact that maybe it is time to remove these drinks away from schools and perhaps persuade celebrities to stop endorsing them and move to promote something that is useful for the children, namely drinking water."
An estimated 17.6 million children younger than five years old are overweight, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States the number of overweight children has doubled and the number of overweight adolescents has trebled since 1980, according to the US Surgeon General.
Children who are overweight or obese tend to carry the excess weight into adulthood and face an increased risk of suffering from diabetes, heart disease, stroke and certain types of cancer.
SOURCE: British Medical Journal, April 24, 2004-By Patricia Reaney