The Science Behind Banning Large Size Sodas In Restaurants (Sorta Like Global Climate Change)
There is contested science… with those contesting the science behind limiting large portions in public venues being paid by beverage corporations. Sound familiar?
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/06/bloomberg_bans_large_sized_soda_the_science_behind_the_decision_.html
There are two questions here, both of them well-studied by nutritionists and epidemiologists. First, would people eat or drink less if they were served in smaller portions? Second, would they lose weight if they consumed less sugary liquid?
Tricky, but not impossible. There are plenty of data, for example, to show that portion sizes have increased over the last 30 years while childhood obesity rates tripled. For a 2011 paper in the Journal of Nutrition, Carmen Piernas and Barry Popkin used national surveys to study the diets of more than 30,000 kids and measure how their junk-food habits changed from 1977 to 2006. They found that soft drink portions had increased by almost one-third. (Once upon a time, a "king-size soft drink" was just 12 ounces.) But sodas and fruit drinks weren't the only foods that swelled: The energy content of cheeseburgers increased by almost one-quarter, pizza slices jumped by 35 percent, and portions of Mexican food by even more than that.
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The case against soda starts with the idea that the body’s response to beverages differs from its response to solid food. People regulate their caloric intake without thinking. If we eat more at one meal, we'll go lighter on the next. But for some reason (the mechanism is still unknown), drinks throw this compensatory mechanism out of whack. A sugar-sweetened beverage might give you as much energy as a candy bar or a heap of mashed potatoes, but you'll be less inclined to account for it with tempered eating down the line.
Before you throw up your hands in despair, there's one more set of facts to consider. Weed and his co-authors work as private research consultants, and their 2011 paper was funded by the Coca-Cola Company. (Weed has given seminars for Coca-Cola's Beverage Institute that are designed to teach doctors "what recommendations should and should not be made to consumers as a result of epidemiological findings."
The 2008 review that found a "near zero" effect of sugar-sweetened beverages was paid for with a grant from the American Beverage Association, which ended up hiring its senior author to a full-time position. (There were some methodological problems with that paper, too.) Neither Richard Mattes nor David Allison received industry funding for their skeptical meta-analysis, but both have taken grants, honoraria, and consulting fees from numerous food and beverage companies.
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