BRITAIN: Cans and bottles of sugar-sweetened colas, lemonade and fruit drinks, which many people think they can drink with impunity, are today implicated as a major cause of obesity and linked to the rise in diabetes by scientists in the United States.
A new study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said the problem may be that the drinks fail to make people feel full in spite of being loaded with calories.
Ms Caroline Apovian, a US nutrition expert writing a commentary on the study, said the human race has probably not yet evolved to cope with sugar-loaded drinks. "A better mechanism for weight gain could not have developed ... Liquid calories are a relatively new addition to the human diet - perhaps the human satiety circuit has not yet adapted to register these calories for what they are," she wrote.
A single can may contain 40 to 50 grammes of sugar. Somebody who drinks one can a day could put on 15 lbs over a year, she said. She advised doctors in the US to tell their overweight patients to cut down. "Reducing sugar-sweetened beverage consumption may be the best single opportunity to curb the obesity epidemic."
She also called on the US government to change its stance on sugar in the diet. Pressure from the US, which was batting on behalf of its food and sugar industries, led to the World Health Organisation this year backing off from its original intention to recommend a specific limit of 10 per cent of calories in a healthy diet coming from sugar.
The US government rejected a scientific report commissioned by the WHO which criticised the food industry for "heavy marketing practices of energy-dense, micronutrient poor food", claiming it was not evidence-based.
The authors of the study, Dr Matthias Schulze of Harvard School of Public Health and colleagues, studied the sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption of a large cohort of female nurses.
They found weight gain was highest among women who increased their sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption from one drink or less a week to one drink or more every day.