Dr. Mark explains why liquid calories from sugary drinks are uniquely dangerous. Your body doesn't register them the same way as solid food, so you consume more without feeling full. Kids and teens drinking these beverages face higher risks of obesity and diabetes.
Do you know what the number one cause of obesity is in America? It's liquid calories. I call it liquid death. See, liquid sugar calories are the most addictive food in our diet. It's something we never have had before as a species. Sugar-sweetened beverages are a unique category of food. Aside from being the single biggest source of added sugar in the diet, sugary drinks drive diabetes and obesity in ways that solid food, even solid junk food, doesn't do. And many of these beverages are also loaded with caffeine, which actually makes their addictive properties worse. So why are sugar-sweetened drinks so bad for us? Here's a few reasons. First, if you drink your calories in sweetened beverages, you don't reduce your solid calories to compensate. So not only do we eat these empty calories, but they're extra calories you wouldn't normally eat. You don't reduce your overall intake just by eating less food if you've had the liquid calories from soda. Second, from 1977 to 2002, the consumption of calories in sugar-sweetened beverages has doubled and is the main source of added sugar calories to our diet. During that same time period, Obesity rates doubled in children ages 2 to 11. Think about it, obesity in kids two years old and tripled in adolescents from ages 12 to 19. I remember when I worked in an urgent care center, I saw a little baby drinking this brown liquid, a seven-month-old baby drinking a brown liquid in the baby bottle. I said to the mother, what's that? She said, oh, that's Coca-Cola. I said, Really? I said, why are you giving your baby Coke? She said, Because he likes it. That's wrong. We need to not give our kids these drinks. They're not able to get the car keys and go driving by themselves. We need to be careful of how we're treating our kids because we're killing them. Now, also more than 90% of children and teenagers drink soda every day. 90% of children and teenagers drink soda every day. Liquid calories actually account for 10 to 15% of their total daily consumption of calories for the average teenager. Think about it. One-fifth of all the calories from a teenager may come from liquid sugar sodas. Think about it. The average daily consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is about 175 calories. That means everybody on average in America, think about it, there's one billion cans of Coke drinking around the world every day. Crazy. Since these calories are in addition to calories that come from solid food, this would add about an extra 18 pounds to the waistline of the average person each year. So 175 calories a day, you don't reduce your solid calories, leads to 18 pounds over a year. Think about it. Each can of soda consumed by children every day increases the risk of being overweight by 60%. One can of soda consumed by a kid every day increases the risk of being overweight by 60%. Soft drinks are the largest source of added sugar to children's diets. We need to stop this madness. We need to stop these liquid calories from poisoning our children and creating this epidemic of obesity and diabetes around the globe.
