The Sunday News
Stanford Chiwanga Online News Editor
HEALTH experts have discarded the long held notion that fruit juices are good for health as they have discovered that they and fizzy drinks are the major contributors to heart diseases, high blood pressure, obesity, cancer, diabetes and tooth decay, Sunday News can reveal.It has been found that the harm caused by calorie-laden drinks is not being taken seriously enough even though they are directly fuelling an obesity epidemic in Zimbabwe and the rest of the world.
Experts have warned that fruit juice, seen by many as a healthy option, should be drunk no more than once a day.
Consumer Council of Zimbabwe executive director Ms Rose Siyachitema said while her organisation was concerned about the findings of the studies, they would be guided by the Ministry of Health and Child Care.
“If it is something that will soon be well known and we have an opportunity to look at it, the Ministry of Health will lead us in making the necessary legislative changes to put warnings on the bottles of the drinks. Only they have the power, it has the clout to make those legislative decisions. If the Ministry of Health looks at it, we will support it. There will obviously be others involved, the manufacturers of the drinks, the government and us. An Act of Parliament will be necessary. As I said, if the studies are accepted worldwide, we will need to sit down and discuss it obviously,” said Ms Siyachitema.
The president of the Hospitals Doctors Association, Dr Charles Moyo, said he was not aware of the potential hazards of fruit juice but confirmed that fizzy drinks were unhealthy.
“I am not aware of the dangers of fruit juice but fizzy drinks are not good for health. The danger is that fizzy drinks are filled with things we simply do not need in a beverage and their over-consumption results in some real health problems. The more carbonated beverages you drink per day, the higher your risk for health issues that relate directly to the amount you are consuming. Carbonated beverages contain more sugar, salt, caffeine, artificial colours, citric acid and phosphoric acid than you need and none of the nutrients that you do need,” said Dr Moyo.
The Minister of Health and Child Care, Dr David Parirenyatwa and his deputy, Dr Paul Chimedza were not available for comment.
In California the state is considering making it compulsory by law for fruit juice makers to ensure that their products carry warnings, just like on cigarettes, to consumers about the contribution of fizzy drinks to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay.
The British Medical Journal’s bmj.com has an article that reveals that a third of children and two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese due to fruit juice.
Halving children’s sugar-sweetened beverage consumption could arrest or even reverse that trend, the piece said.
A European study also shows that adults who drank more than one can of sugary fizzy drinks a day had a 22 percent higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes than those who drank less than a can a month.
Leading cardiologist Aseem Malhotra said: “Sugary drinks represent a particular health hazard. What is especially concerning is that recent scientific studies have confirmed sugar intake is associated with an increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes independent of body weight, revealing that we are all vulnerable. These chronic diseases contribute to considerable suffering and unsustainable health care costs. Its high time health warnings were placed on these ‘mini health time bombs’.”
This shocking discovery has forced health experts to tell parents and guardians to stop their children drinking fruit juice and fizzy drinks.
In the UK, Professor Tom Sanders, of King’s College London, called for all sugary drinks to be removed from children’s diets.
He said: “Kids should be getting their fluid from drinking water. We need to reintroduce the habit of people putting a jug of water on the table and drinking water with their food instead of some sort of fruity beverage.”
Rupert Allen, Lead Dietitian at The Lister Hospital, disclosed that the current recommendation for “added sugar” is up to 10 percent of daily calories, which works out to about 70g sugar per day for men and 50g sugar per day for women.
A new report suggests this should be reduced to five percent.
Scientists warn that drinking one can of soft drink a day can increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.
A major study by Imperial College London found the risk rose by as much as 22 percent for every can consumed per day.
Soft drinks have previously been linked with weight gain and obesity – a well-known trigger for type 2 diabetes – but researchers say the effect goes beyond body weight and may be caused by an increase in insulin resistance.
Other research has shown that sugary drinks can damage the liver and kidneys and are linked to the risk of developing cancer or dementia.
There are growing concerns that fizzy drinks and sweet juices could be more dangerous to health than previously thought.
Professor Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina said: “If there is any item in our food supply that acts like tobacco, it is sugared drinks.”
Professor Nick Wareham, who led the Imperial team said: “Labels on sugar-sweetened beverages should be explicit about how much sugar they contain and should say that we should limit consumption as part of a healthy diet.”
Previously, American scientist Robert Lustig called for sweetened drinks and food to be regulated in the same way as tobacco.
Dr Lustig, a University of California academic, led a team of scientists for the paper The Toxic Truth about Sugar.
“This is a war and you didn’t even know you were fighting it,” he told a nutrition conference last year.
The Imperial study of almost 30 000 people living in eight European countries, including Britain, follows US research which made near-identical findings.
Scientists wanted to determine whether the link held good in Europe, where soft drinks are less popular than in America.
Professor Wareham, of the Medical Research Council’s epidemiology unit, said there was more evidence that people should be cautious about the amount of sugary soft drink they consumed.
He said: “This finding adds to growing global literature suggesting that there is a link between consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, obesity and risk of development of type 2 diabetes. This observation suggests that consumption of these beverages should be limited as part of an overall healthy diet.”
Researchers found that the risk of type 2 diabetes rose by 22 per cent for people having one 336ml serving of sugar-sweetened soft drink a day compared with those not having any.
For those having two soft drinks, it rose a further 22 percent over those having one drink.
