That's why we haven't had anyone start smoking in decades..
Soda sales are down but obesity is still up, so the calories are coming from somewhere. If you believe the other common stories, we're drinking the calories.
I'd wager they come from the rise of coffee-based beverages - which would not be considered soda - but I don't have data to back that up.
For now I think Starbucks et al are benefiting from being culturally identified as more upper/middle-class. Obesity stereotypes seem to have fixated mostly on a "people of Walmart" type image of the fat, slobbish lower classes. So even though a 12-oz Starbucks caramel latte is far worse than a 12-oz Coke, it gets a pass.
Good point, the source of calories isn't the same mix, even though the latte has more total calories (200 calories/12oz, vs. 140). Though I was thinking of the caramel latte rather than macchiato, which is a bit closer, at 27g of sugar: http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/espresso/flavored-latte....
And since it's autumn, it's now time for their signature seasonal drink, the pumpkin spice latte, 300 calories and 39g of sugar per 12oz: http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/espresso/pumpkin-spice-.... You can bring that down to 240 calories and a mere 37g of sugar if you ask for no whipped cream.
I suspect these are actually healthier because of the additional calories - which come in the form of fat and protein, dulling the impact of the sugar spike from a soda.
Even if you're overweight, a latte is more nutritious and likely to make you feel full than a soda.
This suggests a strategy for improving the healthiness of soda: the government should work to make the ice-cream float come back into fashion. "Don't drink your soda plain: add a scoop for your health!"
Saturated fats make carbs digest more quickly. For example, if I have oatmeal I can go to bed immediately because it's low GI. But if I add a spoon of peanut butter then my heart will get a little bit contentuous and keep me awake.
As well, adding a new substance introduces the potential of allergens. I have a dairy sensitivity. If I have a grande latte from Starbucks I'll spend the next hour in a haze. I can have it, but it's worse than just sugar in many respects. But the equivalent soy latte leaves me refreshed. For some people the opposite might be true.
Another issue is size. In Europe or at least at many of the places I've been lately the sizes they have at Starbucks USA do not exist.
A latte for example in Paris or Barcelona is no more than ~6oz or so, maybe less whereas Starbucks USA they start at 8oz and go up to 24oz. I have not visited a Starbucks here to see the sizes. Every coke I've ordered has come in a 8oz bottle as well unlike the unlimited refills and or big-gulp sizes seen in the USA.
Ugh, as an americano drinker I'd be annoyed as hell by this. I have a 52oz water cup at my desk, for me much of things is about the quantity of liquid so I dilute everything. I get my alcohol drinks heavily cut with mixers so they last longer. If drinks are small I finish them way too fast. So a tumbler of a mixed drink lasts me 8 minutes but the same drink in a pint with little ice and more mixer is more like 40 minutes. One leads to shitfaced quick and is a nice buzz. Same for coffee. Sitting at my desk with a small drink I'll finish it without noticing I'm drinking it. 20 oz coffee with the same # of shots and It'll take 30 minutes to finish and I'll actually notice and enjoy it.
I'm an adult, I can pay attention to what I order, and I'm not embarrassed to order things that are not directly on the menu. I'm tipping the bartender and the barrista so they make it the way I want it anyway.
Coffee in Italy, France and other places in Europe is meant to be drink in small cups. Like a shot. I've asked for Americano in France and people are always making fun of me. But I will never understand why you would drink a shot for pleasure when a drink can last way longer. So yeah totally agree with you.
This varies a lot within Europe. In the Nordic countries, the norm is to drink larger cups of coffee, traditionally brewed filter coffee, but lately also various latte/etc. type drinks (overall, similar to what Americans drink), slowly over a longish period of time. That's embedded in cultural expectations as well: going out "for a coffee" is a popular type of casual socializing, and means sitting at a table and chatting for maybe an hour or so while you sip a coffee. Not the Italian-style 30-second outing, where you drink a shot of espresso at a bar standing up.
There is an Internet meme going around that purports to show a German serving size one step larger than extra-lage, called "American." I have no idea if this is real or not. Can any German/European HNers confirm or deny?
Even so, all of these have at least an egg's worth of protein and a little bit of fat, pushing them even higher in the nutrition department. Which is nice.
Tasting sugar is temperature-dependent. Generally, a given amount of sugar makes hot stuff taste sweeter than cold stuff. That's why warm soda tastes too sweet, and cold coffee tastes too bitter.
I doubt many people drink something from Starbucks with or after every meal though. Also way more expensive to do so with Starbucks. 12 pack of name brand soda where I am sells for $3.00 during a typical sale.
Adult obesity rates have leveled off for the last several years. I don't believe it's a coincidence things are moving in a better direction at exactly the same time Americans started drinking less soda (such that both Coke and Pepsi have been seeing declining sales in the US market for the last few years). What Americans aren't doing less of, is consuming fewer coffee products - they're drinking vastly more than they were ten years ago. If that were fueling obesity we'd be seeing a continued increase in obesity among adults.
Further, the obesity rates skyrocketed starting from the early 1980s. They trace almost perfectly inline with soda, fast food, and high fructose corn syrup. They don't follow any line with the vast array of coffee products, which only took off in the mid to late 1990s.
Coffee based beverages don't explain childhood and teen obesity. Those two categories don't drink nearly as much coffee as adults.
Yes and no; if you go into Pret with a kid they will give you a free "babycino" which is some sort of caffeine-free but presumably fat- and sugar-laden hot drink. Kids are being trained early on to drink this stuff.
And I expect juice drinks are part of it as well. Same high levels of sugar and low levels of fiber. The calories aren't as empty, but they're still much easier to consume than whole fruit.
I've got a cold/sore throat and when I do I drink a bunch of OJ. I don't normally drink OJ so I get small windows into it. Every time I get it I notice less and less pulp in it. Today there were tons of "NO PULP" oj out there, even tropicana 50, which is watered and filtered oj. These things are essentially natural koolaid.
I am not sure if the consumers really like and demand no pulp OJ or if it's one of those fads that are being pushed onto the consumers by the big brands. I for one prefer high pulp OJ any day, not for the fiber, but because it makes the juice taste so much better and fruitier. Without the pulp, the juice might as well be made from artificial flavors.
If a beverage has a certain number of calories from sugar per volume, it doesn't really matter whether it's cola-flavored, orange-flavored, vanilla-flavored, tea-flavored, natural-flavored, artificially-flavored, carbonated, uncarbonated, caffeinated, or uncaffeinated. They're all functionally soft drinks, from a dietary perspective, but the graph that charts the decline in carbonated soda does not show the other members in this group.
.
B)
I actually harbor a hypothesis that I have not seen explored which would explain this even if we take it on face value. Contrary to traditional sources of sugar and starch, sweet beverages cause an absorption of sugar unimpeded by the normal vagaries of digestion - there's no chewing, nothing to slow a person down, no cell walls to slowly break down in the stomach, no fiber to absorb and slowly squeeze out the calories.
In the 90's, I used to drink two or three liters of birch beer for something to do while waiting for the pizza. You can keep pouring orange soda into a human body without complaint, long after they would have vomitted up a sugar-equivalent cherry pie. And often our behavior shifts to adopting soda whenever we look for a drink, as the default, several times a day.
We know that blood sugar spikes cause insulin spikes, and we know that ghrelin, insulin, & related hormones act together to modulate the hunger & satiety responses.
My hypothesis is that rapid sugar intake via drinks, when combined with our natural impulse to slake our thirst, acts to dysregulate our hunger and satiety responses in the longer term. Through whatever processes, it detaches hunger from ad libitum consumption levels, sufficient that an extra few hundred calories per day is the 'natural' level that affected people, on average, feel they should be eating. 100 extra calories a day over burn rate is about 10lbs/year of gained weight.
.
C) Obesity is a lagging indicator here. People faced with an ad libitum diet find it very, very easy to maintain their weight. There seems to be a nearly universal misconception that baseline gluttony is associated with high weight levels, but that's bullshit. A person weighing 300lbs has roughly the same neurochemical hunger/stress response as a person weighing 150lbs, when you shortchange them each by 500 calories a day relative to their metabolic burn rate: It's just that metabolic burn rate goes way up as one gains weight. Maintaining weight is the default state. The mystery is why people are on average slowly gaining weight, rather than why fat people are not losing weight.
With regard to B), this is well explored and is called 'GI' or 'Glycemic Index'.[1] High GI foods cause an insulin response in an effort to maintain blood glucose at 5.6 (fasting) - 11.1 mmol/l (postprandial), one of insulins roles is to cause cells to remove sugar from blood and store it as muscle and liver glycogen first then body fat. Once the sugar has been removed from general circulation the hungry feeling recurs.
Saturated fats provided the longest sensation of satiety, followed by protein, then high fibre carbohydrates.
Additionally, our livers have the nifty ability to create sure from pyruvate, lactate, glycerol, and glucogenic amino acids through a process called Gluconeogenesis.[2] Loosely, this is handy for the brain which usually uses glucose for energy, except during fasting when ketones are used.
@TheSpiceIsLife, do you think hijacking the "Gluconeogenesis" process is what the sugar-water industry is aware of? ie: sugar hit following sugar removal.
" A person weighing 300lbs has roughly the same neurochemical hunger/stress response as a person weighing 150lbs,"
Not sure about this. Will depend on the type of (over) eater. Do they over eat because of psychology (stress reaction), do they over-eat due to some hormonal imbalance (lower gut hormone despite eating) and subject keeps eating. Then there's binge eaters. Each of these three types of over-eating have a different "neurochemical hunger/stress response" to a normal person who has eaten enough and stops. [0]
You're missing the point: a 300lbs person who stays 300lbs is not over-eating. Over-eating isn't biologically defined against some ideal meal size, it's defined against homeostasis: consuming as many calories N as the body burns. That's what the brain's hunger feedback mechanisms are supposed to care about.
Carrying around extra fat causes N to go up.
"Getting fat people to go on diets that cause them to lose weight" is approximately as difficult, motivation-wise, as "Getting skinny people to go on diets that cause them to lose weight". It's extraordinarily difficult, because their bodies are screaming at them to go back to the refrigerator.
The novel question to answer is why overeating - consuming more calories than you burn, and thus gaining weight steadily over long time periods - is so much more prevalent now than it was in previous decades. Why people who are already fat are inclined to eat more (much more) than skinny people, is the simply metabolic reality of the body's drive for homeostasis.
There is a healthcare problem, of course, with having fat people around, but the scientific question of what is making them all have weight problems at higher rates than before, is somewhat distinct from the practical problem of how we get the existing fat demographic to lose weight. Aggressive funding of bariatric surgery seems to be the least-bad method of the latter for the moment; Almost nothing else can be shown to work effectively at the levels required, since we're effectively fighting the strongest drive the body has after breathing.
These are good points. This one I'll have a stab at.
"The novel question to answer is why overeating - consuming more calories than you burn, and thus gaining weight steadily over long time periods - is so much more prevalent now than it was in previous decades."
Because it's not just about calories in but calories out too. People spending all day sitting in front of screens replacing all other forms of both work and play...
Biking could help with this, but there's so much cultural momentum against treating bike infrastructure as a first-class citizen, or heck, even a second-class citizen like walking. And without safe bike lanes, very few people will bike.
The amount of subsidies and preferential treatment we give to cars is really astounding, but at this point most people in the US can hardly think of it being any other way.
I tried that, and even if I was in the Netherlands I don't think it would apply. Biking has its constraints, you can't go at your own pace even in dedicated lanes, you have to be very actively focused on others, and you need secure parking lots if you plan to do something else otherwise 50% chances it will get stolen.
> Most consumers aren't idiots. But they're aren't scientists or academic researchers for the most part either. Bring them relevant, accurate information and they are capable of making rational choices.
In the US, cigarettes have had warning labels for almost 50 years and still ~20% of the population smokes.
I'm confused by your comments, and am asking for clarification of your perspective. What exactly is your point?
While 20% of the population still smokes, the incidence rate has hugely decreased over time[0].
According to the CDC, in 1965, ~43% of the population smoked. In 2011, it was just under 20%, with a goal of 12% by 2020.
Transparent labeling, increased regulation and awareness, plus general advances in understanding the consequences of smoking have had a massive effect on the rates of smoking. It's not perfect, but a similar reduction in obesity over the next 50 years would be an incredible accomplishment.
Now if only we could tackle that burgeoning mental health problem...
Well, some people will always want to smoke and eat poorly, and that is their choice. But cigarettes were never really insidious in the same way something like "sugar" is; I think sugar will have to be seen as a vice rather than what it is, one of the cheapest sources of calories you can get kids to eat. And that's going to have to take some deep change in the market.
And sports drinks, energy drinks, and flavored waters are certainly part of it.
The largest difference is movement. Which helps keep down obesity in many other nations: If you walk everywhere, or bike, or use transit for 90% of what you do, you will burn a lot more calories (especially grocery shopping and carrying them home via the metro).
Compared to driving everywhere, sitting at work, etc...
That study is indeed interesting. I just skimmed through it and read the abstract, definitely interesting.
The question now is, what is it? Could it be that the difference in food – not just caloric value of intake – has an influence? Did people start eating more prepackaged foods? If yes, what specifically influenced it? Why did it not influence Europe nearly as much?
The calories don't have to be replaced with anything - total intake can be down even if obesity is still rising, obesity will just be rising less than it otherwise would.
They're not necessarily sugared in the sense of a regular Coke, but I'm not sure if they differentiate for the types. Monster, which has become a rather large company, sells a lot of their zero sugar / zero calorie products.
They moved to using erythritol. I drink the products and have yet to find any counter evidence erythritol isn't drastically superior to pretty much every other sweetener. It has been shown to be very safe (with studies spanning multiple decades now), very little of it is metabolized, and it doesn't cause the gastric reactions that competing products like xylitol do.
Percentages of adults within these categories [Overweight, Obese, Extremely obese] increased gradually until the late 1970s, at which point they began to climb more quickly, leveling off somewhat around 2000.
(Scroll down to the section titled "Trends in Overweight and Obesity among Adults, United States, 1962–2010")
All the extra weight is coming from the abundance of sugars that are added to food. Especially the low-fat or fat-free foods. So we aren't just drinking the sugar, we are eating it too.
Soda sales are down but obesity is still up, so the calories are coming from somewhere. If you believe the other common stories, we're drinking the calories.
I'd wager they come from the rise of coffee-based beverages - which would not be considered soda - but I don't have data to back that up.