John Myers
Would you buy a soft drink even if you knew you had to jog for 50 minutes or walk more than 8 kilometers to get rid of the calories in the sweet drink? Soft drinks are one of the main reasons for the rising rates of overweight and obesity – especially among children and adolescents – and can therefore have dramatic health consequences. But soft drinks have other consequences…
Better no soft drink than sport
Soft drinks age prematurely, soft drinks, soft drinks lead to premature births, soft drinks promote strokes and soft drinks limit athletic performance.
All this information is known. But they don’t seem to worry consumers much. Because soft drinks are still bought thoughtlessly.
On the other hand, a note on the soft drink that says you have to jog for 50 minutes or run more than 8 kilometers to work off the calories in the soft drink has a real deterrent effect.
This solution was found by Priv. Lecturer Sara N. Bleich and her colleagues from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the USA – particularly to prevent children and adolescents from drinking excessive amounts of soft drinks.
Warnings on soft drinks work
Over a period of six weeks, the researchers put warning signs on the soft drink shelves in six supermarkets in underprivileged neighborhoods in Baltimore.
One of the following information could be read on it:
- “A bottle of this drink contains 250 calories.”
- “The calorie content of this drink is equivalent to sixteen sugar cubes.”
- “You have to go jogging for fifty minutes to get off that soft drink.”
- “In order to train off this soft drink again, you have to walk eight kilometers.”
A total of more than 3,000 adolescents between the ages of twelve and eighteen bought a drink in one of the shops during this time. The scientists interviewed a quarter of them after the purchase.
As a result, 17 percent of the young people interviewed bought fewer or no more soft drinks.
Before the signs were put up, sugary drinks accounted for as much as 98 percent of the drinks sold in stores. With the signs, that figure dropped to 89 percent.
The signs were able to motivate the young people to buy fewer calorie-containing drinks, fewer soft drinks overall, and no drink at all water.
According to the researchers, the most effective was the sign that said that you had to walk five miles to work off the calories from the drink.
Incidentally, the changes in the buying behavior of the young test subjects were permanent: even after the signs had been removed, they bought fewer sugary drinks.
