Easy access to options found to ease teens' soda habit

While the Legislature debates whether to ban soda machines from Massachusetts schools, Children's Hospital Boston may have found a more powerful way to curb teenagers' consumption of sugar-laden drinks: Deliver an alternative right to their door.

Adolescents who received weekly deliveries of water and artificially sweetened drinks at home reduced their consumption of sugary drinks by 82 percent during the six-month experiment, Children's researchers found, helping overweight children lose nearly one pound a month.

The children received $100 mall gift certificates for taking part in the study, but the authors said children would probably switch to sugar-free drinks without the reward if healthy drinks were readily available.

''People often get overwhelmed by nutrition advice and give up," explained study coauthor Cara Ebbeling of the hospital's division of endocrinology. ''We opted to study one simple, potentially high-impact behavior, and made it easy for adolescents to replace sugary drinks with noncaloric beverages."

Soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks have been increasingly under scrutiny as the percentage of overweight children continues to rise. A single can of soda typically contains 150 calories and beverages account for more than 10 percent of many children's daily calorie consumption. In response, the Legislature is considering limiting or banning the sale of sugar-laden drinks from school vending machines.

Before the Children's Hospital study, published in this month's issue of the journal Pediatrics, there had been only one other effort to measure weight loss from cutting soda consumption, and the results were ambiguous. Ebbeling said her team wanted to clearly document the impact of sugar-laden drinks on obesity.

The Children's researchers asked 53 adolescents at Boston-area schools, ages 13 to 18, to give up sugary drinks and allowed them to select healthier alternatives for home delivery. At the end of six months, all the children had tried to follow the no-soda rule and the heaviest one-third had lost weight. During the same period, a control group of overweight children who did not change their beverage consumption gained a small amount of weight.

The researchers said schools could set up healthy-drink programs by buying sugar-free drinks in bulk that students could take home. They estimated that such an effort would cost about $35 per student for six months, but noted that is cheaper than most weight-loss programs. ''It should be relatively easy to translate this into a public health approach," Ebbeling said. She said the researchers plan a larger study on whether children continue to choose healthy drinks after home delivery ends.

Scott Allen can be reached at allen@globe.com.