If you’re an average American, you drink 44.7 gallons of pop (“soda” for the coastal readers out there) every year. Adding in sports and energy drinks, the average American consumes about 50 gallons of sugary beverages a year.
Assuming you are drinking non-diet beverages, you would ingest 46 pounds of sugar, or about 7.3 gallons.
If you need help visualizing that, this picture shows how much sugar you would consume if you drank one 12oz soft drink a day for a year (5 gallons):
Photo credit: Ken Leesbow
Not only a disturbing sight, the enormous amount of sugar consumed in soft drinks has been linked with weight gain and diabetes, contributing to 1 in 3 overweight or obese children and teenagers. In fact, teenage boys are estimated to consume over three cans of soft drinks a day, or 15 gallons of pure sugar per year (3 of those water jugs).
Even if you’ve beaten the soda habit completely (or replaced your collegiate Mt. Dew addiction with a serious Diet Coke habit like a few of us have), these numbers weigh heavily on your pocketbook if not your waistline. Recent estimates pegged the health care cost of obesity at $147 billion in 2008. Like cigarette smoking, we all pay for this costly health habit that many critics have elevated to the status of a full blown public health crisis.
Solving such a crisis requires a mix of public action and personal behavior change. Thinking about that giant tub of sugar next time you reach for a Coke might stop you -- the individual -- but past public health campaigns, like combating cholera and stopping smoking, show stigmatization alone is insufficient. Combating cholera required not just education, but the establishment of sanitary municipal water supplies. Cutting our national percentage of smokers down to a record low of 22 percent required those disturbing “Truth” ads, but also the imposition of public smoking bans and higher taxes.
New York City’s proposal to ban the purchase of sugary beverages with food stamps is a good step in this direction. Coupled with a rather gruesome public education campaign, it appears to be a promising effort to align government spending with the government goal of reducing obesity, and subsequently health care costs. This is especially salient for the more than 800,000 citizens of New York state that are on both food stamps and Medicaid.
For further reading, check out our previous posts on obesity.
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