KTK-Nutrition

What city is going to tax soft drinks and other beverages?   New York City tried and failed to do this.   This week, the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia, decided to be not so friendly to soft drinks and other beverages.   The City Council passed a 1.5 cent per ounce tax on many beverages.    Doesn’t sound like much, but buy a 20 ounce soda and the tax would be 30 cents.   Want a 12 pack of sodas?   Then add $2.16 to your bill.   This doesn’t include the 8% sales tax that would be charged on that soda.   What beverages are being taxed? Sugary beverages including sugared sodas, sports drinks, Iced Tea like Snapple Iced Tea, lemonade, Gatorade, Energy Drinks like Monsters Energy Drink, Powerade Mountain Berry Blast would be taxed. Diet sodas like Diet Coke, Coke Zero are also taxed.   V8 Splash Carrot Orange Drink would be taxed as it is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup and contains only 15% juice.   Vitamin Water such...

How many calories are in those beverages you are drinking every day?   Many people drink high energy drinks, Starbuck’s coffee, soft drinks and drinks like Gatorade without even considering those calories.    And calories from beverages easily add up.    The Alliance for a Healthier Generation has some good advice for high school students that can be applied to all of us. Drop Liquid Calories is one of the Alliance for Health’s recommendations.   Many of us aren’t eating our calories but drinking our calories by consuming sugary beverages – soft drinks, energy drinks, sweetened ice tea, coffee with flavored syrups.   High school students and adults “are drinking more sugary beverages than ever before.”   As the website notes, the biggest source of added sugar in the diets of many of our youth are sugary beverages.   Surprisingly, many of these sugary beverages are provided by parents and they can easily change what beverages are in the ho...

The World Health Organization created quite a stir recently when they announced we should cut our added sugar intake to only 5% of our daily calories ( WHO | Draft Guideline: Sugars intake for adults and children ).     Sounds easy?   Not really as manufacturers sneak added sugar into almost every food we eat.   The WHO focused on all sugars, but in this blog I will focus on ADDED sugar, what manufacturers add in processing.   Added sugars are n ot sugars naturally present in foods like fructose in an apple or lactose in milk.    So what did the WHO propose and why?   Currently, WHO recommends added sugars should make up less than 10% of our daily calories. WHO Draft guidelines:   Sugar should be less than 10% of our total calories with even more health benefits if we reduce sugars to less than 5% of our daily calories. What is 5%?    This means reducing our sugars to about 25 grams a day or 6 teaspoons for adults. ...