Effects of sugar-sweetened beverages on body weight and chronic disease risk

Historically, most calorie intake came from solid foods. Today, children consume an unprecedented amount of calories from sugar-sweetened beverages. Numerous lines of investigation suggest that SSB consumption promotes excessive weight gain in children and adults, including prospective observational analyses, feeding studies and randomized controlled trials. Plausible physiological mechanisms relate SSB to obesity, namely, that compensation for calories in liquid form is less accurate and complete than for calories in solid form. SSBs also appear to make a major contribution to the burden of chronic disease in the US, not only by causing weight gain, but also through weight independent mechanisms. Measures to decrease consumption of SSB in children may be the single most feasible and important diet-related public health intervention available today.