Study confirms sugary drinks are a major cause of childhood obesity

New York City, USA, recently announced that it will ban restaurants from selling large sugary drinks starting in March next year due to the large number of obese people. In order to further prove that sugary drinks do cause obesity, the United States published three related research reports, analyzing the obesity tendencies of the subjects and confirming the risks of sugary drinks.

![Drinking sugary drinks has become a common habit for teenagers. One cup a day may not seem to have high calories, but it is the main cause of obesity in the long run. (Photo/taken from the American "TIME Magazine")

According to a report by TIME magazine, three studies recently published in the United States have confirmed that sugary soda and fruit juice drinks are closely related to the increasingly serious obesity problem in the United States.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved more than 33,000 people and analysed their diets, including how often they drank sugary drinks. The results showed that people who drank one bottle of sugary drink a day were at least twice as likely to be obese as those who drank one bottle a month.

The study, conducted at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, involved 641 children aged 4 to 11, half of whom drank sugary drinks or fruit juice, while the other half drank sugar-free drinks with added sugar substitutes. After 18 months of observation, it was found that the group that drank low-calorie beverages gained an average of 6.39 kg, while the group that drank sugary fruit juice drinks gained 7.36 kg, once again confirming that drinking sugary drinks can easily lead to obesity.

The third study came from Children's Hospital Boston, which targeted 224 overweight or obese teenagers who drank sugary drinks every day and asked them to change their eating habits to only drink water or low-calorie soda every day. After one year of control, the teenagers who drank diet soda gained 1.6 kg, while the control group who continued to drink sugary drinks gained 3.5 kg.

However, after the study ended, almost all the subjects resumed their habit of buying sugary drinks because sugary drinks were so easy to obtain. This also proves that New York's practice of removing large sodas and other drinks from the shelves is indeed necessary.