14 DAY TRIAL // Many of the medical experts present at the international obesity conference held in Sydney, Australia, suggested that all sugary soft drinks play a key-role in the alarmingly increasing rates of morbid obesity epidemic and a solution is needed in order to make people drink less sugary beverages.
Whether they are sodas, fruit juices or energy drinks overloaded with sugar, the population's access to them should be more restrictive. Therefore, participants at the conference thought that the most effective method would be taxing sugary drinks exactly like in the case of alcohol and cigarettes.
This is going to oblige soft drinks producing companies to raise prices and they will not be as available as they are nowadays for everyone. Instead, people could shift their attention and preferences from the unhealthy beverages to more healthy ones, such as milk, natural fruit juice or simply water.
Professor Barry Popkin from the University of North Carolina who took part in the Australian conference stated that people consume today higher amounts of sugary, laden with calories soft drinks. But in order to compensate for the extra-calories in the beverages, people do not cut on their food intake. In conclusion, they are simply unaware of the fact that sugary drinks can cause a wide range of health disorders, including obesity.
Backing up the idea of his doctor fellows concerned about the highly and rapidly increasing rates of obesity, Tim Gill, director of the Australasian Society for the Study of Obesity commented:
"Companies have been able to bring together a panel of experts whose views suit their particular promotional needs, so that's always a degree of concern." However, what the companies tend to do "is to confuse a picture where there is generally a degree of consensus, and I think soft drinks is one of those areas where there's pretty much a consensus that soft drinks have been a major contributor to the increased calorie intake, particularly amongst teenagers, and that there's a huge potential to address this problem by reducing soft drink intake."
On the other hand, Coca-Cola has hosted a breakfast in Sydney in the same period of time. At the breakfast, experts around the world presented studies and ideas about the role of sugar in a balanced diet. They reached the conclusion that sugary soft drinks have been stigmatized by nutritionists lately and beverages should not be considered as crucial for the development of obesity epidemic as other highly more dangerous factors.
Dr John Foreyt from the Behavioral Medicine Research Center in Houston Texas who took part in the Coca Cola meeting stated: "I think the answer to really looking at healthy lifestyle is balance and variety and moderation, and anytime you pick out a single culprit you're going to be in trouble because obesity and health risks are all associated with multiple factors."
"Well, calories are calories, so you want to look at balance and if people are getting their calories from one source, too many calories, people can get in trouble, but that caloric source can be anything, so you really have to look at your overall diet, and I think that's still the bottom line," he added.