NYC’s Sugar Shake Up
I have to say, I’m pretty proud of NY city. We banned trans-fats from our fast food joints in 2007 and are now tackling the obesity epidemic by looking at how much sugar New Yorkers are consuming. The New York Health Department just released a new campaign aimed at waking us up to just how much extra sugar we consume on a day to day basis, primarily in the form of sodas, sports drinks and coffees.
The ad campaign, appearing in subways, shows a bottle of soda being poured into a glass. The drink turns into a blob of fat when it reaches the glass. Gross. While sugar alone is not the only culprit, it does account for a significant portion of extra calories consumed each day. The large amounts of sugar hidden in these drinks is staggering! A 20oz cola has 16.5 teaspoons of sugar!! could you imagine dumping that much sugar into your morning coffee? Let’s do some simple math, for comparisons sake. A typical small cup of coffee is about 10 oz, half of that bottle of soda I just mentioned. Picture your small cup of coffee, say from Dunkin Donuts. Now picture yourself adding eight and a half packets of sugar to that little cup!!!! My teeth are rotting just thinking about it. But this is so normal, we don’t even realize it. In addition to our morning coffee, eight packets or less, we’re often also consuming sodas, sports drink, and sweetened iced teas, without any regard to how much sugar is in them.
Teens, who admittedly drink large quantities of both sodas and sports drinks can get an average of 360 extra calories a day. They would have to walk 70 city blocks to burn that off, and I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that’s just not happening.
The city is promoting water, seltzer, or low-fat milk instead, an admirable suggestion (and since NYC tap water is one of the cleanest out there, let’s ditch the plastic Poland Spring bottles, and start carrying our own reusable bottles).
Already the campaign has met with some not so happy faces from the Beverage Association. Marion Nestle, author of numerous books on food politics and nutrition, author of one of my favorite blogs, and professor at NYU posted a response from the Beverage Association on her site, which I’ll repost here:
“The messages being spread about beverages by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene are so over the top that they are counterproductive to serious efforts to address a complex issue such as obesity. Like most foods, soft drinks and other sugar-sweetened beverages are a source of calories. Simply naming one food source as a unique contributor minimizes a disease as complex as obesity. The key to energy balance and maintaining a healthy weight is counting calories in and calories out, not focusing on specific foods or abstaining from any one food or beverage in particular. While we support the campaign’s desire to help people lead healthier lives, we do not believe the campaign imagery represents a serious effort to address a complex issue such as obesity…Further, the beverage industry provides an array of beverages with a wide range of calories, including zero calories…all of which can be part of a balanced lifestyle [her emphasis].”
So yeah, ditch the soda, even the 0 calorie diet ones, and just drink water. if you want something sweet, eat a piece of fruit!
