ISLAMABAD: While candy consumption has risen slightly over the past three decades, it is drowned by the trend in sugary drinks. Today, the biggest single source of calories in the diet is fizzy soft drinks. The average teenage boy will get 15 teaspoons of sugar a day just from these drinks, according to one report.
"It`s shocking because it`s all empty calories," said Dr. Caroline Apovian, director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at Boston University School of Medicine.
Medical researchers watching this trend say the growing fondness for sweetened drinks may be one of the major forces behind children`s rates of obesity, diabetes and tooth decay.
It also may set up children for a lifelong increased risk of osteoporosis. The problem is not just what children are drinking but what they are not drinking. In the 1970s, children chose milk - a source of vitamins, protein and calcium - over sweetened drinks by almost 4 to 1. By the late 1990s, in the latest data available, soft drinks had almost caught up with milk.
Any kind of excess sugar could be detrimental to health, but sugar from beverages creates unique concerns, doctors say.
"The thing about the drinks is that they are so insidious," said Dr. Sarah Blumenschein, a pediatric cardiologist with UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. With candy, she said, "most kids will stop eating. When they`re full, they stop. With drinks, they often won`t."
Hot, thirsty children, she said, "can load up and drink themselves a couple thousand calories a day."
This may occur in part because the liquid calories in those ever-growing servings do not seem to set off feedback mechanisms of fullness. Food, even a candy bar, normally activates hormones that help the body feel full. But experiments suggest that beverages may bypass those triggers.
"When we consume a calorie as a beverage, we don`t adjust our food intake," said Dr. Barry Popkin, an obesity researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And some scientists suspect that the sweetener used in those drinks since the 1970s - high-fructose corn syrup - may be metabolized by the body differently than glucose, the main energy source from food.
Last year, Dr. Popkin and his colleagues wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that "soft drink consumption may be an important contributor to the epidemic of obesity, in part through the larger portion sizes of these beverages and through the increased intake of fructose from high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose."
For example, one study published in 2001 followed 548 Massachusetts schoolchildren for 19 months, trying to see whether their weight was associated with drink preference. They found that each additional daily serving of any sugar-sweetened beverage, including fruit drinks, increased the likelihood of obesity in a child by 60 percent.
Dental experts, for their part, worry that sweet drinks stand to threaten years of improvement in pediatric dental health. Studies have suggested that sugar in liquids may in some ways have a bigger effect on teeth than its solid counterpart. Some dentists speculate that this may be because sodas have not only sugar but also acid that might erode a tooth`s protective enamel.
Dr. Teresa Marshall of the University of Iowa, who has conducted several studies on the effect of beverages on health, also believes it has something to do with the way drinks are consumed. Foods are eaten at once and washed down. Children often have sweet drinks between meals while doing other things.
"If you`re carrying around a beverage for a period of time, you have a constant exposure to the sugar," Dr. Marshall said.
Experts note than any of these health problems have complex roots. People are gaining weight because they are consuming more calories than they used to and aren`t burning them off before they are stored on hips, waists and thighs. This is not solely the fault of sugar.
"What we can`t prove is that it`s the soft-drink consumption that has caused the obesity epidemic," said Dr. Apovian from Boston University, "but we can say the two have risen in parallel." | 
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