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January 17, 2007 | Issue 99 | ||
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Lose the Soft Drinks, Lose the Weight
“Eat your calories. Don’t drink them,” dietitians at the Pritikin Longevity Center® have for years advised guests wanting to shed weight.
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ASK THE EXPERTS
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That’s because calories in food form, say, apples, are much more satisfying than the same number of calories in liquid form (apple juice). A satisfied appetite can keep hunger from sending you places you don’t want to go, explains Jeffrey Novick, MS, RD, Director of Nutrition at Pritikin.
Never has this advice been more important for Americans, with our ever-burgeoning waistlines and epidemic rates of obesity, especially among U.S. kids and teenagers.
In a recent study that monitored the drinking habits of 548 sixth and seventh graders for two years, David Ludwig, MD, at Children’s Hospital Boston found that for each additional daily serving of a sugar-sweetened soft drink, the incidence of obesity was significantly increased.*
Teenagers Lose Weight
In new research, teenagers who cut back on sugar-rich drinks reduced body fat – up to a pound a month.** That’s the only behavior they changed in the study. They didn’t stop eating cheeseburgers and fries. They didn’t even exercise more. Simply reducing consumption of sugary drinks yielded a modest reduction in weight.
In the study, Dr. Cara Ebbeling of Children’s Hospital Boston and fellow scientists randomly assigned 103 adolescents aged 13 to 18 years who regularly consumed sugar-sweetened drinks to one of two groups. The teenagers in the first group, the control group, kept drinking their usual amount of calorie-rich sodas, juices, punches, lemonades, and sports drinks – totaling about 2.5 servings daily, or 375 calories worth.
To burn off the 250 calories in a 20-ounce bottle of regular soda pop, a 135-pound person would have to:
1. walk three miles in 45 minutes
2. play vigorous basketball for 40 minutes
3. bike vigorously for 22 minutes
The kids in the experimental group got to choose whatever noncaloric drinks they wanted – water, diet sodas, or no-calorie juice drinks. Weekly, supermarkets delivered their no-calorie choices to their homes. Periodic phone calls from the scientists’ staff and refrigerator magnets ("Think Before You Drink") provided reminders.
After six months, the kids in the control group gained weight. Dr. Ebbeling and her team calculated that a single 12-oz sugar-sweetened beverage per day translated to about one pound of weight gain over four weeks. "Sugary beverages have no nutritional value and seem to make a huge contribution to weight gain," they wrote.
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Copyright 2007 Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa. All rights reserved.
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Phone (305) 935-7131
Pritikin Perspective - Healthy Living Made Easier
Pritikin Perspective is a publication for Alumni of the Pritikin Longevity Center. It is dedicated to helping people make healthy changes in their lives. The articles in this publication should not be considered specific medical advice, as each individual circumstance is different. You are strongly encouraged to seek medical advice before beginning a program of diet and exercise.
Editor/Writer: Eugenia Killoran.
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