News » October 06

Low-Cal Drinks Help Teens Trim Down

It sounds too simple to be an effective weight-loss strategy. But it just may be. Let your teens who are battling their weight choose their favorite low-cal beverages, stock the refrigerator with those drinks, and watch the pounds slip away.

That's the suggestion from a team of researchers at Children's Hospital Boston, who studied the strategy, found that it worked, and published their conclusions in a recent issue of the journal Pediatrics.

"Simply decreasing sugar-sweetened beverage consumption seems to be a promising strategy for preventing and treating obesity," said Cara Ebbeling, co-director of obesity research in the division of endocrinology at the hospital and the study's lead author.

The strategy makes sense to another expert, and here's why. "This works because it is a small change," said Lona Sandon, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association and a registered dietitian at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

"The adolescents are not being asked to give something up or go out of their way to do something differently," Sandon said. "Nor must they worry about counting calories."

In the study, Ebbeling and her team evaluated 103 teens; half were asked to pick non-caloric or low-caloric drinks they liked and a supply of them was delivered to their homes. The other half were not asked for their favorite non-caloric drinks nor did they receive any. Over the 25-week study, the researchers found that consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages dropped by 82 percent in the low-cal beverage group compared to the control group.

When the researchers weighed the teens and re-measured their body mass index (BMI, a ratio of weight to height), they found that the heavier teens in the low-cal group lost about a pound a month.

The low-cal choices included sugar-free sodas, non-caloric lemonade and ice tea, and bottled water.