New study highlights importance of teen drinking preferences

05/04/05 To combat the escalating rates of childhood obesity, parents should go beyond what's on their children's plate and look at what's filling their glass, suggests a new study that was presented at the Experimental Biology scientific conference.

The study found that no other single food provides more calories to a teenager's diet than sodas and fruit drinks.  In all, these sweet drinks provide about 13 percent of a teenager's total calories -- more than cakes, cookies and other sugary foods.  Sodas and fruit drinks are also the single leading source of added sugars in a teen's diet, providing more than half of all added sugars they consume.

Researchers from the University of Vermont, University of British Columbia, and ENVIRON Health Sciences Institute studied the diets of more than 3,000 children and teenagers ages 2-18 using food consumption data from the government's recent National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.  They found that consumption of sodas and fruit drinks increases in a step-wise fashion as U.S children get older, while milk intake declines in a similar way -- suggesting that milk is being displaced by soft drinks and juice drinks. By the time a child enters adolescence, he or she is drinking about twice as many sugary sodas and fruit drinks as milk.

Despite the decline in milk intake as children reach their teen years, milk remains the number one source of several key nutrients – including calcium, phosphorus, magnesium and potassium.  Calcium and potassium are chronically low in a teenager's diet and both were highlighted as "problem nutrients" in the recently released Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

The new study also found that milk is among the top four food sources of protein, vitamin A and zinc for both children and teens.

Flavored milk is an increasingly popular choice for teenagers, yet the study found that there was little impact on the amount of added sugars it provided.  Chocolate milk and other flavored milks contributed only 2 percent of the total added sugars in a teen's diet, compared to 50 percent or more that soft drinks and fruit drinks provided.

The shift from milk to sodas and fruit drinks can be damaging to a teen's bones, according to co-author Susan Barr, PHD, RD, professor of nutrition at the University of British Columbia.  Research suggests a shortage of the calcium provided by milk during the teenage years could lead to a failure to maximize bone mass, setting the stage for osteoporosis in the future.

Additional studies indicate that too little milk combined with too many soft drinks are contributing to the problem of childhood obesity.

Experimental Biology is one of the leading scientific conferences in the country -- attracting more than 16,000 biological and biomedical scientists. The annual meeting brings together scientists from dozens of different disciplines, from laboratory to translational to clinical research, from throughout the United States and the world.

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