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Do You Know How Many Soft Drinks Your Kids are Drinking Daily?

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Calories from sugary drinks

The CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) likes stats. They run surveys on a myriad of topics. And they try to figure out not just how to control disease, but how to prevent it. When it comes to obesity and diabetes, the CDC would very much like to learn what are the causes.

They had a pretty good hunch, so they ran a survey to learn about the soft drink consumption habits of Americans. Here’s what they found: we drink way more sugary drinks than we should. In fact, the America Heart Association cites sugary soft drinks as the number one source of calories in America today.

The group drinking the most colas is teenage boys – with a daily consumption of 273 calories.

That’s almost 2 cans of coke per day!

Or 17 teaspoons of sugar added to their bloodstream.

Or 2.5 added pounds of weight per month.

Sigh…

Teenage girls drink less, just 10 teaspoons of added sugar per day. Only 1.7 pounds of monthly weight gain.

The data is from a survey the CDC conducted in the years 2005-2008. (Side note: It makes you wonder why the government took 3 years to publish this report…)

According to the American Beverage Association, a trade group counting Coca Cola and Pepsi as its gold members, caloric soft drink consumption has dipped in the last few years. Mostly because consumers are shifting to diet drinks, an unfortunate mistake that is the result of genius advertising.

What’s interesting is that the CDC stats above don’t take into account fruit juices. This may come as a shock, but even 100% natural fruit juices are very high sugar, placing them in the “treat” department alongside cola, rather than the hydration department together with water. Imagine how much higher the calories would be if we threw the morning OJ into the mix.

So, do you know what your family’s soft drink consumption stats are? How are you going to reduce those numbers?

What to do at the supermarket:

If you need encouragement, here’s a stat you will appreciate – an average family of 4 people will save $500 a year switching from soft drinks to tap water.

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  • http://twitter.com/lauren_015 Lauren Smith

    Why are 2-5 year olds drinking soda??

  • http://www.itsnotaboutnutrition.com Dina Rose

    Thanks for sharing the stats.

    I’m glad you added the bit about fruit juices. My concern with juice isn’t the sugar per se, but that it gets kids in the habit of drinking sweet flavored beverages.  It’s only a short hop (sip?) from juice to soda.Dinawww.itsnotaboutnutrition.com

  • Beautifuldancer920

    While I agree with the view that no one should be drinking soda, especially kids, I MUST make.a comment on correct word usage…It’s “myriad topics” or “a plethora of topics” not “A myriad of topics”. It’s not gramatically correct to say “A myriad” of anything. Sorry, I read this blog every day and I respect the writers, but you must have correct grammar when writing for a national audience!

  • Ruth

    You do understand that weight gain is more complicated than that? Saying “This could cause a weight gain of up to Xlbs in a child of this age bracket if drunk when they are already consuming the maximum number of calories required to maintain thier present weight and if they do no extra exercise to compensate, or their bodies do not metabolically compensate for the caloric increase” may however be too wordy and does not have the same scare value.
    Though I dont know why youd give two-year-olds fizzy drinks?

  • Jim Cooper

    You should know better than to link diet soft drinks with sugary ones. There is simply no scientific evidence that they are bad. See I reviewed some of these claims in an article last year. There does not seem to be any clear evidence that diet sodas contribute to obesity. See http://www.examiner.com/food-i…

  • Paris by Mouth

    Thanks for the information. France is poised to implement a tax on sugary sodas in January 2012 because their consumption is also starting to rise, although not to the same level as in the USA. Do you think the soda tax in 30 American states has had any effect on soda consumption? http://parisbymouth.com/the-daily-bite-oicnelis/

  • abilino

    Unfortunately, as a daycare worker, I often saw parents give their children soda.  Little kids.  Crazy.

    Beautifuldancer, using “myriad” as a noun is actually correct in that phrasing, as referenced by the Miram-Webster website. See below:

    “Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of,
    seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is
    still properly only an adjective. As the entries here show, however, the
    noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it.”