Opinion: Sweet news about teens and soda
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The good thing about America’s unhealthy eating habits -- what can you say about a country where about a quarter of the population eats the recommended amount of veggies, and when they do, it’s most often in the form of french fries? -- is that it doesn’t take much to constitute improvement.
So it is with a new report out of the Centers for Disease Control finding that a quarter of American teenagers drink a soda every day. That’s a lot of kids downing a lot of sugar. But really, according to public health officials, that sentence should have said that only a quarter of American teens quaff a soda daily -- because a decade ago, the number was three-quarters.
Horrible to think, but what can you expect when public schools were practically shoving soda at teenagers, forging lucrative deals with bottling companies to place their brands in vending machines and school cafeterias and holding rallies to promote their products and logos?
Perhaps the best news in all this is the awareness that Americans can be persuaded to change their consumption habits through more awareness, just as the nation has made major strides against smoking after anti-smoking campaigns changed the way society viewed cigarettes. Teens said they were drinking more water and tea because soda wasn’t good for them. Who says today’s kids aren’t learning anything?
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--Karin Klein
