Alarming number of kids are slurping down sugary drinks, survey finds
About two-thirds of kids, if you stop them on a given day, have had at least one soda, fruit juice or sports drink.
That's an average of about 164 calories for boys and 121 calories a day for girls, said a survey released Thursday by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study found children on a given day consume on average a little more than 7% of their daily calories from sugary drinks, the leading sources of added sugars — such as corn syrup — in American diets. Sugary drinks, studies suggest, are linked to health problems in kids, including weight gain, diabetes and tooth decay. The CDC puts the U.S. childhood obesity rate at 17%, or about 12.7 million people.
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The study looked at boys and girls age 2 to 19 from 2011 to 2014. It found nearly two-thirds of those surveyed had at least one sugary drink on a given day. For boys, about a fifth had two drinks, barely edging out the girls. About 10% of both boys and girls, the study found, had three sugary drinks in a day.
Overall, boys tended to drink slightly more sugary drinks than girls when taking a percentage of daily calories. But the real differences emerged when the kids were broken down along age and cultural lines. The older kids got, the more sugary drinks they consumed. For those aged 12 to 19, almost 10% of their daily calories came from sugary drinks, while those 2 to 11 averaged somewhere between 4 and 6.6%.
Based on a percentage of total daily calories, black children consumed the most (7.9% for boys, 8.9% for girls), but only slightly more than white children (7.6% and 7.5%), who were followed by Hispanics (7.3% and 6.8%). The study found Asian children drank almost half as much as the top three groups (3.5% and 3.6%)
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Government dietary guidelines suggest people keep calories from added sugars under 10%. The government also suggests people choose drinks with no added sugars.
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