Consuming sugar-laden beverages contributes to weight gain.

A younger friend of mine said to me the other day, “If I have to consume calories, I’d much rather get them by eating them than by drinking them.”

This was my friend’s own way of saying that if he has to put on weight, he’d rather do it chomping than sipping. 

While the instance in which my friend said this was one of mindless small talk, his seemingly innocuous statement revealed wisdom beyond his years.  Because new research suggests that people are much more likely to put on weight when guzzling calories than when devouring them.

Researchers discovered this after performing a series of tests and follow-ups on a group of randomly selected participants – 810 in all – that took part in another randomized study called the PREMIER trial. 

The participants ranged in age from 25 to 79 and involved lots of follow-ups to see where the participants’ weights were at over an 18 month period.  To gauge what they were eating and drinking, researchers would call the participants at random times and on random days to ask what and how much they’d eaten and drank over the past 24 hours.

In the instances where the participants put on or lost weight, both food and drink factored into their overall weight gain.  But with regards to which contributed more, researchers say drinks had the most impact, as the fewer sugar-sweetened drinks they consumed, the more precipitous their weight loss (or weight gain) was.

For instance, when participants reduced their consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages by one serving per day (one serving usually amounts to 8 fluid ounces), it resulted in about a pound of decreased weight loss in the shorter follow-up periods (six months) and about a pound a half of weight loss in the longer follow-ups (18 months).

Now, again, the researchers note that both food and beverage consumption factored into weight change, but when they broke down the numbers piecemeal, sugar-sweetened drinks was the only variable that had a “significant” impact one way or the other.

And this wasn’t hard to determine, for sugar-sweetened drinks were the leading variety of beverage consumed by the participants (37 percent).  Sugar-sweetened drinks were defined as non-diet sodas, fruit punch, fruit drinks and high calorie, sugar-sweetened drinks like Kool-Aid).

The researchers involved in the 18-month study came from a mélange of prestigious institutions, such as Duke University, the University of Alabama, Pennsylvania State University, and was financially supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the National Institutes of Health and a several other fine institutions. 

The full findings are published in this month’s issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Granted, this finding won’t register high on the “Wow!” factor, but it bespeaks of the terrible toll sugar-saturated drinks have on the body.  And it’s an important find, because while we always hear about “mindless eating” I find drinking to be far more mindless.  In other words, because of the quickness with which someone can drink as opposed to chew to gain sustenance, it’s easier to fluff off liquid calories than solid calories.  This study confirms the fact that fluffing off liquid calories is a great way to gain weight.

Avoid mindlessness and embrace mindfulness; avoid calorie-laden soda and embrace nutrient-laden agua.

Source:
ScienceDaily

Researchers from Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center set out to find the factor that makes African-American women more susceptible to Type 2 diabetes with the Black Women’s Health Study. In their study, they sent out initial questionnaires to obtain information about the participants’ medical history, typical diet and other basic facts. Every two years more questionnaires followed in order to track any significant changes in lifestyle or the contraction of any serious illness, including diabetes. In the first ten years 2,713 of the participants developed diabetes.

Researchers studied the links between these women and were able to pinpoint sugary drinks as the common denominator. The women who were drinking two or more soft drinks a day had a twenty-four percent increase in diagnosis over those who were drinking less than one soft drink a month.

More surprisingly was a similar association found regarding sweetened fruit drinks.  There was a thirty-one percent increase in incidence with women drinking two or more fruit drinks daily.  Although the perception of fruit drinks has typically been a positive one, Julie Palmer, ScD, a professor at Boston University and lead author on the study warns, “The public should be made aware that these drinks are not a healthy alternative to soft drinks with regard to risk of Type 2 diabetes.” 

Although this research was compiled based on the lives of African-American women, it must be said that all can benefit from this information. The ingredients used in these drinks harmfully effect all who drink them, not just one particular group. Doctors and experts have cited sugary drinks as causing many problems. Michael Murray, ND and Joseph Pizzorno, ND write, “Soft drinks have long been suspected of leading to lower calcium levels and higher phosphate levels in the blood. When phosphate levels are high and calcium levels are low, calcium is pulled out of the bones.”  This can lead to osteoporosis.

Marion Nestle, PhD links sugar drinks to severe weight gain, writing, “The relationship between soft drink consumption and body weight is so strong that researchers calculate that for each additional soda consumed, the risk of obesity increases 1.6 times.” Obesity is known to cause its own slew of issues and illnesses. This is particularly unfortunate as “soft drinks are the single greatest source of caffeine in children’s diets.”

However, children are not the only ones who should fear the hazardous effects of sugar drinks. Earl Mindell, MD wrote, “For anyone over age 40, soft drinks can be especially hazardous because the kidneys are less able to excrete excess phosphorus, causing depletion of vital calcium.” Diet drinks are not even a safe alternative. According to the doctor, “Diet sodas that are low in calories are high in sodium. Too much salt in the diet may cause more calcium to be excreted in the urine and increase the risk of osteoporosis.”

The only healthy alternative is water. It removes harmful toxins and wastes from the body and helps to digest food properly. It improves energy and makes it easier to lose weight and keep skin healthy. Most importantly it can prevent heart attacks. The American Journal of Epidemiology found that women were forty-one percent less likely to die of a heart attack when drinking more than five glasses of water a day.

You know that saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”?  It’s a saying that winds up being true more often than not.  Here’s the latest evidence of its truthfulness…

Research conducted by scientists from Purdue University has found that those artificial sweeteners found in diet sodas, desserts, bottled waters and cereals does not help in the battle of the bulge.  In fact, artificial sweeteners may even contribute to weight gain and obesity!

Published in the February issue of the journal Behavioral Neuroscience, the Boilermaker (Purdue’s mascot) researchers fed lab rats two different kinds of yogurts:  one group with regularly sweetened yogurt, the other sweetened with the zero-calorie sweetener saccharin.  Across the board, the rats that ate the yogurt flavored with saccharin put on more weight, more fat, and ate more food later on than the rats that ate the regular yogurt.

What explains such a finding?  Well, the researchers don’t know for sure, but they believe it has something to do with the fact that zero-calorie sweeteners are digested in a fashion that the body doesn’t recognize.  When we consume food, our bodies respond through the feeling of satiety, or fullness.  This is the body’s own way of saying, “Ok, I’m full, enough is enough.”  With zero-calorie sweeteners, however, that satiety factor is taken away, often leading one to eat more than they would were they to eat a food sweetened with regular sugar. 

As with nearly all of these studies, more research needs to be done before making any broad based conclusions, but their theory makes a lot of sense, especially considering the fact that one in three Americans are considered obese, despite the widespread consumption of these so called “guilt-free” foods.

Another interesting finding by the researchers was the fact that the group of rats that ate the saccharin-sweetened yogurt did not show an increased core body temperature.  Of course, the body’s temperature and metabolic rate increase when we consume calories as calories are a unit of heat.  How fast the body’s metabolic rate is often determines one’s propensity to gain weight (an increased metabolic rate is one of the many reasons why exercising regularly is so beneficial).  The fact that the rats’ metabolic rate did not increase in the saccharin group may help explain the observed weight gain.

If this sounds counterintuitive to you—eating fewer calories yet putting on more weight—fear not:  It sounds counterintuitive to the scientists as well, especially considering the fact that millions of people can eat diet foods and no-calorie sweeteners without putting on a pound.  But for millions of other people—people who are eating these no-calorie sweeteners, exercising regularly, and not losing weight—this finding helps explain the lack of results  (it also corroborates a finding on diet soda’s link to obesity I wrote about last year).

So, does this finding mean you should start drinking regular soda and foods saturated with sugar rather than no-calorie sweeteners?  Certainly not.  What it means is that just because a food or drink without added calories may seem like you can eat more of it, you can’t.  After all, as the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true…well, you know the rest.