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Featured Article
Beverage Consumption and Weight Management
By Matt Fitzgerald
Recently I made a late night run to a fast food drive through with my wife and a friend (hey, I’m human!). Our friend ordered some kind of burger and a medium drink. When the girl working behind the window handed me the drink I thought she had made a mistake. It was enormous!
“Is that a medium?” I asked.
She just looked at me like I was stupid.
What’s really stupid is the fact that 20 percent of the calories in the average American’s diet now come from beverages. That’s one in five calories! Of all the supersizing that our diet has undergone over the past 30 years, our drinks appear to have been supersized the most. How did we get so thirsty?
Anyway, that’s the bad news. The good news is that cutting calories out of our drinks is one of the easiest ways to cut calories from your overall diet. Drink calories do little to satisfy our appetites, so they are easier to do away with than extra calories we get from favorite foods. A recent study found that kids were more willing to give up sodas than to give up snacks or start exercising.
The first drinks you’ll want to give up are those that contain lots of sugar: sodas, energy drinks, and the like. Replace these with water or, if you must have sweetness, with diet soft drinks. I am no advocate of diet soft drinks, but compared to regular soft drinks they are definitely the lesser of two evils.
Another common source of wasteful calories in drinks is caffeinated beverages such as lattes, café mochas and so forth. These should be replaced with lightly or unsweetened coffee or tea.
And then, of course, there are alcoholic beverages. In moderate amounts, alcoholic beverages, and wine in particular, are healthy. But the calories add up very quickly, so keep your tippling habit to one drink a day, except maybe when you’re celebrating a great race performance that you achieved in part because you cut the wasteful drinks calories from your diet and got leaner!
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