Nutrition-stripping sweet drinks replace bread as American's foremost source of calories

• Tufts University's Dr Odilia Bermudez studied information obtained from the 1999 to 2000 National Health and Nutrition Survey and found that 67 percent of respondents reported drinking as much as three servings of soda or sweet drinks each day.
• Previously white bread was identified as the main energy contributor in the American diet, accounting for between five and six percent of calories consumed.
• Although white bread is not a good food compared with other more nutritious foodstuffs, this was seen as a preferable state of affairs since sweet drinks are nothing more than empty calories.
• "We can assume that people are eating less of other nutritional foods."
• Despite this, she does not advocate bridging the nutrition gap through wholesale replacement of sweet drinks with functional or fortified alternatives because of the quantities that are being consumed.
• Both groups were less likely to be obese, but these percentages were considerably lower than expected.
• Nonetheless, Bermudez said that the survey could encourage the industry to take a long, hard look at how they advertise food and drink products with little or no nutritional value, as well as serve as a tool to help educate consumers about how to obtain the most nutritional benefit from calories consumed.
• Dr Bermudez's initial findings were presented at Experimental Biology in March and more controlled analysis currently underway using same data looks set to deliver the same results.
• Given the continuing increase in obesity rates in the US, Dr Bermudez said she would expect these to show similar trends.
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 64 percent of adults age 20 years and over are overweight or obese.
• In December Patricia McPeak, CEO of NutraCea and member of the California obesity-prevention committee told NutraIngredients-USA.com that malnutrition is the main problem faced by the US because of its eating habits.