Posted by admin in Food & Wine on August 27th, 2012 | one response
By Allison Aubrey, NPR
Diet soda, once the soft drink of choice for adults watching their calories, isnt just for grown ups anymore. Increasingly, kids are getting their fix, too.
In fact, consumption of diet drinks has doubled among U.S. children over a decade. About 1 in 4 of adults drink low-calorie or no-calorie sweetened drinks and foods. And for children: Six percent were consuming diet drinks in 1999-2000. This increased to 12.5 percent in 2007-08. The findings were recently published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
So, if parents are helping kids cut calories and sugar by offering diet drinks, is this good for kids health?
This is the $64,000 question, researcher Barry Popkin tells the Salt. Popkin is the author of The World is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies,and Products That Are Fattening the Human Race, and a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
On one hand, theres some evidence that replacing soda and juices with calorie-free beverages can help teenagers control their weight. Theres also a study that found diet soda drinkers were less likely to develop metabolic syndrome, as long as they were eating a prudent diet.
But on the other hand? Popkin says some people seem to use diet sodas to rationalize a very unhealthy diet the Ill have a Diet Coke With That Big Mac crowd.
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Read more from the original source:
Youths switching from full sugar drinks to diet
