Early Consumption Of Soda Indicator Of Unhealthy Diet.

I drank soda. I more than drank soda – I lived and breathed soda all throughout my teens and twenties. It was only a year or so ago that i gave it up for good.  I also didn’t drink milk very much. My family was never a milk family – we just don’t have a taste for it. My kids now don’t have a taste for it either. They eat a lot of other things though that give them what they need. Not being a milk family would have generally been ok when I was growing up if  we ate other things to compensate for the calcium deficit. We didn’t. I ate a ton of crap. I was a chubby kid who had low self esteem and I ate crap and drank diet coke. There was a time in my late teens/early twenties, that I would go through a full 6 pack of diet coke a day. Hello I am a diet cokaholic and my name is Stephanie.

Now that I am “on the wagon”, I do think about what all that Diet Coke has really done to my general health long term. What exactly does phenylalanine do to your system when you consume mass quantities of it?  I don’t have a taste for it anymore but it sure will be “interesting” to see what the long term effects are going to be….

The ten-year study showed that girls who drank soda at age five had diets that were less likely to meet nutritional standards for the duration of the study, which ended at age 15. Girls who did not drink soda at age five did not meet certain nutritional requirements, but their diets were healthier.

The difference between the two groups in nutrient intake is “not just because of what they are consuming, but because of what they are not consuming,” said Laura Fiorito, postdoctoral fellow in Penn State's Center for Child Obesity Research.

Milk intake differed greatly between the two groups — soda drinkers drank far less milk than non-soda drinkers — and milk has all of the nutrients that differed between the groups except fiber. At age five, non-soda drinkers consumed 10 to 11 ounces of milk daily, while soda drinkers had less than seven ounces.

“Adequate nutrient intake is important for optimal health and growth,” the researchers reported in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.