Drink More Sugar, Weigh More
Have you ever gotten “that look” after saying you don’t drink juice or calories in general? Sort of a cross between someone trying to calculate the square root of 397 and That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard?
When did drinking water become so boring and fringe? Unless you’re doing some sort of physical activity or are officially “on a diet”, many folks find drinking plain water odd.
If you’ve declared your week-long New Age cleanse and are chugging gallons of water on your new weight loss plan – okay. But if you just like to drink water – weird. Vitamin water with a bunch of sugar and chemicals is socially acceptable, but water from the tap plus a carrot means you’re a health nut.
Empty calories by any other name are still empty calories
Every so often there is a big outcry about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and how it’s a great social scourge causing obesity and disease. Everybody correlates the increase in high fructose corn syrup from 1970 with skyrocketing rates of obesity, but they fail to mention that there was also a 135% increase in energy consumed from soft drinks and fruit drinks from 1971 to 2001, which also correlates with a doubling of obesity (1-2).
Yeah okay, so HFCS is probably not the best thing for you, but if overnight all high fructose corn syrup was replaced with sucrose from organic sugar cane grown in the most pristine fields with dancing unicorns… you’d still have an obesity problem.
Why? We consume too many damn sweeteners, period!
Extra calories
From 1971 to 2001 there was an increase of 278 kcal (or 278 food calories) from drinks. At the same time, milk consumption went down by 38% (1). That’s almost 14% of total calories for the average 2000 kcal/day diet. It doesn’t take a diet guru to figure out that if people switched to water they would lose nearly 30 pounds a year!
Have things gotten any better? This week I review an article that compares our intake of beverage calories over the last twenty years.
Bleich SN, Wang YC, Wang Y, Gortmaker SL. Increasing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages among US adults: 1988-1994 to 1999-2004. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 Jan;89(1):372-81.
Methods
In the US, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) collects data about what people eat and their health. It’s been done annually since 1999. (If you’re interested in their other findings, check out their website.
The two time periods researchers looked at in this study were 1988-1994 and 1999-2004, including 15,979 and 13, 431 people respectively. To put this into a musical reference for you, this spanned George Michael (when he was “straight”) to Nirvana and Britney Spears to the Black Eyed Peas.
As you can imagine, researchers gathered a lot of interesting information over the years. For this study, they looked at BMI and changes in sugar-sweetened beverage intake.
Sugar-sweetened beverages
We typically think of soda as a sugary drink, but the “sugary drink” category includes a lot of other stuff, such as:
- “low-calorie” drinks
- sweetened teas
- fruit drinks and juices
- sweet coffee-bar drinks like Frappucinos and hot chocolate
- rice and soy milks
- sport drinks
Yes, even the so-called “healthy” things like fruit juice, sports drinks, and rice milk have plenty of sugar — often as much as a can of soda.
Read your labels, people!
Too bad that list lumped sport drinks in there, but I guess there are a lot of people out there sipping their thirst-quenching, electrolyte-replenishing drink to recover from their long run to the fridge between commercials.
Researchers use the term “sugar-sweetened”, but the reality is that they were reporting all sweetened drinks, whether that was sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, sucrose, or glucose.
Results
I’m sure most of us have a pretty good idea where this is going to go, but actually having some supporting evidence is always nice.
The state of the nation
First, the percent of overweight and obese individuals went up from 1988-1994 surveys to the 1999-2004 surveys.
Figure 1 Proportion of normal, overweight, and obese
Figure 1 above shows you the breakdown – 65% of people were overweight or obese in the last survey. Not good. For fun, I decided to forecast what percentage of normal people there would be in 2024. My back-of-the-napkin, two-data-point forecast says just over 10%. Hopefully I’m wrong.
Since there were more people that were overweight or obese, you’d think that there would be more people trying to lose weight, but there were fewer, with only 35% trying to lose weight in the latest survey, compared to 41% back in 1988-1994.
Changes in drink consumption
By the second survey (1999-2004) sugar-sweetened drinks were the most-consumed drinks, with 63% of people surveyed having some of these drinks on a given day. The second most-consumed was coffee/tea (60%) and third was milk (48%).
At the same time as rates of obesity went up, the amount of sugar-sweetened drinks people drank went up too (Figure 2).
Figure 2
Not any surprise there.
People surveyed between 1999-2004 drank 29% more calories from sugar-sweetened drinks than before (1988-1994). Yeah, that’s only 46 kcals more, but now they’re drinking over 200 kcal/day of sugar-sweetened drinks that don’t fill them up or give them any nutrients – double whammy.
Over a year, those calories translate into just under 21 pounds just from sugar-sweetened drinks alone.
This doesn’t include calories from other drinks like alcohol (99 kcal), juice (32 kcal), milk (84 kcal) and coffee/tea (11 kcal). All drinks together total 429 kcal, also known as a meal.
If things weren’t bad enough, the only caloric drink that people drank less of was milk (9 kcal less, from 92 to 84 kcal).
Sugar-sweetened drinkers
Where did these calories come from? Were the drinks higher in calories or did people just drink more of them?
Answer — more sugar-sweetened drinks.
The researchers looked at people who drank at least one sugar-sweetened drink. They found that back in the late 80s & early 90s, people on average drank 650 ml (22 oz). That went up to 838 ml (28 oz) by 1999-2004 (Figure 3) — an increase of 55 kcal (239 to 294). Again, this is only from people who were drinking at least one sugar-sweetened drink a day on average.
Figure 3
After breaking up the groups by age, the researchers found that young adults (20-44 years old – glad to see I’m still a young adult) drank the most sugar-sweetened beverages calories during both surveys — 231-289 kcal/day.
Conclusion
It seems that back in the 80s we had bigger hair and bigger shoulder pads but smaller bodies.
In this study, surveys between 1988-1994 and 1999-2004 reported that people drank more sugar-sweetened drinks (46 kcal more), were less interested in losing weight (6% less), and had increased rates of obesity (31% from 22%) in the later study. Seems pretty straightforward: taking in more sugary drinks, and less motivation to lose weight, would lead to weight gain and eventual obesity.
It seems we get stuck overanalysing things. I’m as guilty as anyone — duh, I’m a professional over analyzer with accreditations to prove it.
Are people getting fat because of all the high fructose corn syrup? Maybe.
But whether the calories come from sucrose, glucose or high fructose corn syrup is irrelevant, because the greater issue is that over the past three decades sweetened beverage intake has increased, and now makes up a good chunk of daily calories.
From 1999-2004 young adults drank 289 kcal of sweetened beverages a day. Does the exact molecular breakdown really matter?
Bottom line
The easiest way to lose weight? Drink fewer calories.
Cutting out sugary drinks from your diet will likely help you lose a fair bit of weight without doing much else, since on average each American drinks 203 kcal of sugary drinks per day.
It’ll also help you save money — hey, that water tap still works just fine.
Oh yeah, and I’ll say it again: Read labels.
And maybe, avoid these Harmful Drinks in America (Cold Stone PB&C — 2,010 calories, 131 g fat (68 g saturated), and 153 g sugars? Ouch!)
References
- Changes in beverage intake between 1977 and 2001. Nielsen SJ, Popkin BM. Am J Prev Med. 2004 Oct;27(3):205-10
- Prevalence and trends in obesity among US adults, 1999-2000. Flegal KM, Carroll MD, Ogden CL, Johnson CL. JAMA. 2002 Oct 9;288(14):1723-7.