Sugary drink consumption among kids climbed nearly 23% over three decades, study finds

08.08.2024 - 01:13 / euronews.com

Kids in nearly every part of the world are drinking more soda and other sugary drinks than ever, and child obesity rates are climbing to match, according to a new study that spans three decades and 185 countries.

In 2018, children were having an average of 3.6 servings of sugary drinks per week, a 22.9 per cent increase from 1990 and a much sharper uptick than among adults, according to the study, which was published in The BMJ and led by researchers in the US, Greece, Canada, and Mexico.

Child obesity rose in tandem during that time period, and now affects about 160 million kids and teens around the globe.

“Our findings should raise alarm bells in nearly every nation worldwide,” Dariush Mozaffarian, the study’s senior author and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University in the US, said in a statement.

Researchers looked at sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), which include sodas, energy drinks, and fruit drinks and exclude 100 per cent fruit and vegetable juices, non-caloric artificially sweetened drinks, and sweetened milk, tea, and coffee.

Previous studies have shown that sugar-sweetened beverages are linked to a higher risk of obesity among young people, which in turn is tied to more health problems during adulthood, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers.

“It has a very high price for the health of individuals, not only in childhood but long-term, and also a very high cost to society,” Dr Berthold Koletzko, a paediatrics professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the president of the European Academy of Paediatrics, told Euronews Health. He was not involved with the study.

In the new report, intake of sugary drinks was higher among older kids and teenagers than among younger children across the globe. In most regions, rates were also higher in urban areas and among children whose parents had higher education levels, though these disparities didn’t exist in high-income countries.

That’s likely because in lower-income countries, people in urban areas and those who are highly educated also have more money and are thus more likely to opt for sugary drinks, Koletzko said, while in high-income countries, it’s the other way around.

“It’s a question of affordability,” Koletzko said.

Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East and North Africa reported the highest intake levels overall (9.1 and 7.3 servings per week, respectively). Even so, kids in Latin America had slightly fewer sugary drinks, on average, in 2018 than they did in 1990.

Rates fell in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990s and early 2000s, and then crept up again more recently – shifts that researchers said reflect the region’s economic trends and the emergence of healthy eating