According to a systematic review of recent cohort studies and randomized controlled trials, published in the journal Obesity Facts, consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks is associated with overweight and obesity in both children and adults.
The new systematic review of previous studies showed an overall positive association between the consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks and indices of obesity in both children and adults. Image credit: MasterTux.
Over the last decades the prevalence of overweight and obesity all over the world has been rising, also in young children. From 1975 to 2014, the worldwide prevalence of overweight and obesity increased from 23% to 39% in females and from 21% to 38% in males.
According to the 2013 UNICEF, WHO and World Bank estimates, between 2000 and 2013 the number of overweight children worldwide increased from 32 million to 42 million.
Meanwhile, the intake of sugar-sweetened beverages has also increased worldwide.
As they are sweetened with various forms of sugars, sugar-sweetened beverages add calories (mean 114 kcal/day) to the normal diet and are the largest contributor to added sugars.
Moreover, there is heavy marketing worldwide, also in low- and middle-income countries, and sales of sugar-sweetened beverages are rising.
“The evidence base linking sugar-sweetened beverages with obesity and overweight in children and adults has grown substantially in the past 3 years,” said senior author Dr. Nathalie Farpour-Lambert, President-Elect of the European Association for the Study of Obesity and a researcher at the University Hospitals of Geneva in Switzerland.
“We were able to include 30 new studies not sponsored by the industry in this review, an average of 10 per year. This compares with a previous review that included 32 studies across the period 1990-2012.”
“This new, more recent evidence suggests that the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages is positively associated with obesity in children,” she said.
“By combining the already published evidence with this new research, we conclude something that in many ways should already be obvious: public health policies should aim to reduce the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and encourage healthy alternatives such as water. Yet to date, actions to reduce sugar-sweetened beverage consumption in many countries are limited or non-existent.”
A total of 244,651 study participants were included in this new review.
Of the 30 studies included, 20 were in children and 10 were in adults. 33% were done in Europe, 23% in the United States, 17% in Middle or South America, 10% in Australia, 7% in South Africa, and the remaining 10% in Iran, Thailand and Japan.
Almost all (93%) of the 30 studies in children and adults revealed a positive association between sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and overweight/obesity, while only one prospective cohort study in children showed no association.
The one randomized controlled trial in adults demonstrated no effect of the intervention. While those adults receiving the intervention lost more weight however the result was just outside statistical significance.
Dr. Farpour-Lambert said: “associations between sugar-sweetened beverages and body weight measures might be affected by other diet and lifestyle factors, but the majority of the prospective cohort studies adjusted for these possible confounding factors including several nutrition and lifestyle factors, and for all, except for one study, a positive association between sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and overweight/obesity was found.”
“This suggests an independent effect of sugar-sweetened beverages.”
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M. Luger et al. 2017. Sugar-Sweetened Beverages and Weight Gain in Children and Adults: A Systematic Review from 2013 to 2015 and a Comparison with Previous Studies. Obesity Facts 10 (6): 674-693; doi: 10.1159/000484566
