A Los Angeles City councilman is asking the police department to crack down on kids buying energy drinks, saying the buzz-worthy beverages contain far more caffeine than recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Councilman Bernard Parks, a former LAPD chief, is pushing for warning labels and restricting the amounts of energy drinks a customer can buy. He is also pushing to change drink placement on shelves to prevent children from buying them [PDF link to city motion].

In "many instances they are drinking seven to 10 times more caffeine than if they were drinking a regular soda," Parks said.

The push comes after a Consumer Reports study found some energy drinks to contain more caffeine than printed on the label, and as the FDA investigates claims made in 2012 that five deaths are possibly linked to the popular energy drink Monster.

"I think it is the FDA's job primarily to set standards but we as a city can do something as far as purchase location, labeling, and who gets access," Parks said.

Parks also recommended that LA County research the effects of energy drinks similar to studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Monster energy drinks contain 240 milligrams per 24-ounce can, about two and a half times the amount in an average cup of coffee, according to Consumer Reports.

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The South Los Angeles community in Parks’ district has been called a "food desert" due to lack of healthy options, and tops the charts in obesity rates at 30 percent of kids, according to the LA County Department of Health.

"What a waste of time," said South Los Angeles resident Wayne Clinton. "There's so many other things that need to be done."

With parts of South LA neglected, Clinton suggested the streets of South LA be "swept up" before the council focuses on banning caffeinated drinks.

"Look across the way -- you got alleys that need cleaned up," Clinton said.

The motion was submitted on March 6. Parks said he hopes it will move forward in committee this week.

NBC4's Michelle Valles contributed to this report.

By Jonathan Stempel
Reuters  

Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc, the maker of 7UP, was sued on Thursday for allegedly misleading consumers over the supposed health benefits of an antioxidant it uses in some varieties of the soft drink.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group for food safety and nutrition, said the company's advertising and packaging suggest that the drinks contain antioxidants from blackberries, cherries, cranberries, pomegranates and raspberries, rather than added Vitamin E.

Chris Barnes, a Dr Pepper Snapple spokesman, in an emailed statement called the lawsuit "another attempt by the food police at CSPI to mislead consumers about soft drinks."

Antioxidants help protect cells from damage caused by free radicals, which are unstable molecules associated with cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute.

In December 2008, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration objected to labeling in which Coca-Cola Co described its now-discontinued Diet Coke Plus drink as "Diet Coke with Vitamins & Minerals."

The FDA told the world's largest soft-drink maker it "does not consider it appropriate to fortify snack foods such as carbonated beverages."

Barnes said Dr Pepper Snapple's label for 7UP Cherry meets FDA regulations, and says the drink does not contain juice. He also said a new formulation of that product, to be available in February, will not contain antioxidants.

Thursday's lawsuit was filed with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. It seeks class-action status on behalf of purchasers nationwide of the products, a variety of financial damages, and a halt to the alleged misleading advertising.

The named plaintiff is David Green, a resident of Sherman Oaks, California, who said he would not have bought the soft drinks had he known their antioxidants did not come from fruit.

Dr Pepper Snapple launched 7UP Cherry Antioxidant in 2009. It also sells a diet version of that product, as well as 7UP Mixed Berry Antioxidant and Diet 7UP Mixed Berry Antioxidant, according to its website.

Shares of Dr Pepper Snapple closed down 30 cents at $43.24 in Thursday trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The case is Green v. Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc, U.S. District Court, Central District of California, No. 12-09567.

Good news for parents worried about their kids’ weight – it’s possible to get them to stop drinking sugary drinks, and the kids gain less weight when they stop. The bad news is it takes a lot of work.

Two studies published Friday show that kids will stop drinking full-sugar sodas, juices and sports drinks if they have something else handy and if they are encouraged and rewarded for doing so. In one study, the kids actually lowered their body fat and in both studies the kids who got diet drinks or water gained less weight than children allowed to continue their usual habits.

The studies demonstrate that it is possible to fight back against childhood obesity, but it will take a lot of vigilance. They may also vindicate a recent, controversial decision by New York to ban the sale of supersized drinks that are sweetened with sugar.

In one, Cara Ebbeling, Dr. David Ludwig and colleagues at Boston Children's Hospital worked with 224 overweight or obese 9th and 10th graders who said they regularly drank sugary beverages. They divided the group into half, and made it easy for half the kids to ditch the junk drinks. They delivered water and diet drinks to the homes every two weeks for a year, called the parents each month and had three in-person visits with the kids. They also sent reminders in the mail, and sent gift cards to supermarkets.

Providing water and diet drinks “virtually eliminated” drinking of sugary sodas and juices, the researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

At the start, the kids drank on average nearly two sugary drinks a day – sodas, full-sugar fruit juices, sports drinks and so on. The group that got the sugar-free drinks and water, plus counseling and reminders, virtually stopped drinking sugary drinks at all. After a year, they also weighed less – four pounds less on average than the kids in the “control” group who kept on with their soda habit.

The effect on Hispanic kids was astounding. They gained 14 fewer pounds than the control group.

"No other single food product has been shown to change body weight by this amount over a year simply through its reduction," says Ludwig.

However, after two years, the benefits stopped – the kids given sugar-free drinks went back to their bad old habits and everyone ended up with the same amount of body fat, on average.

Image Source / Getty Images

Two studies show that kids who swap sugary drinks for water or diet drinks gain less weight.

A second study, done in the Netherlands, had similar findings. Janne de Ruyter of the VU University Amsterdam and colleagues studied 641 normal-weight children aged 4-12. The children were randomly assigned to get either 8 ounces of artificially sweetened beverage or 8 ounces of sugar-sweetened drink delivering 104 calories for 18 months.

“We developed custom drinks for this study to ensure that the sugar-free and sugar-containing drinks tasted and looked essentially the same,” De Ruyter’s team wrote. As in Boston, the kids were regularly encouraged to drink the beverages they were given.

“Children were eligible only if they commonly drank sugar-sweetened beverages, because we considered it unethical to provide sugary beverages to children who did not habitually consume such beverages,” they added.

After 18 months, the kids all grew, of course, but the kids who got the diet drinks gained less weight—about two pounds less after 18 months. “The sugar-free group gained significantly less body fat,” De Ruyter’s team added. “Children in the sugar-free group who completed the study gained 35 percent less body fat than those in the sugar group.”

The children who got the sugar also grew very slightly taller. “Although the difference in height gain was minute, it warrants scrutiny,” they wrote, noting that some studies suggest that obese children prepuberty grow taller than non-obese children. They predict the affect will wear off by adulthood.

Again, the experiment wasn’t easy. The kids required constant reminders and 164 of the kids stopped drinking the drinks, most because they didn’t like them.

Their findings contradict studies that suggest drinking diet drinks can also cause weight gain, because the body senses the sweet taste, wants more calories, and gets them elsewhere – either through hunger or by extracting more calories from food.  They also start to answer questions about where our obesity epidemic comes from – sugary drinks, junk food, too little exercise or a combination, says Dr. Andrew Racine, a pediatrician and also an economist Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. But he says, they don’t offer a prescription for fighting the problem. “Nobody could take one of these studies and replicate it on a population level,” he says.

Dr. Sonia Caprio, a pediatrician at Yale University, points out that sugar-sweetened drinks make up 15 percent of calories for some Americans, with adolescent boys drinking an average of 357 calories a day. “Sugar-sweetened beverages are marketed extensively to children and adolescents, and large increases in consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages have occurred among black and Mexican-American youth, who are known to be at higher risk for obesity and the development of type 2 diabetes than their white counterparts,” she wrote in a commentary on the studies.

 “Taken together, these ... studies suggest that calories from sugar-sweetened beverages do matter,” she wrote.

Racine agrees there and he approves of New York’s decision to ban the sale of the largest sweet drinks at restaurants, delis and movie theaters, calling it a social experiment.

“It will be possible to look at the policy and compare New York to other cities,” he said. He likens it to the beginning of the battle to reduce smoking, and says it will take many approaches together to help get people to drink less sugar – publicizing research that demonstrates the harm, taxing harmful products, making it harder to get them, and, eventually, social disapproval.

The beverage industry has fought hard against any suggestion that sugary drinks underlie the obesity epidemic, while also working with schools to replace full-sugar sodas in school vending machines with water and diet drinks. Racine said their actions show they fear public policy can affect soda consumption. "If they didn’t believe this was going to have a potentially important impact .. they wouldn’t be worried about it," he says.

Have you been able to steer your kids away from sugary drinks? What's worked for you? Tell us on Facebook.

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Karen Rowan
MyHealthNewsDaily

The best way for parents to reduce the amount of soft drinks their young children drink is to not serve it with meals, a new study suggests.

The findings from researchers in Belgium showed that children from higher-income families drank less than half — about 42 percent — as much soda as children from lower-income families. However, the vast majority of the difference between the income groups could be explained by three parenting practices: not offering soda at mealtimes, not letting kids drink soda whenever they want, and not keeping soda in the house, according to the study.

"Parents have a great influence through the food they make available and accessible to the child, their own nutritional behavior and by child-feeding practices," the researchers wrote in their study, published online April 1 in the journal Appetite.

Reducing the amount of soda kids drink is important, the researchers say, because sugary beverages have been linked with obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

What works, what doesn't
Researchers based their findings on questionnaires completed by 1,639 parents of children ages 2  to 7.

The practice of not offering soda at mealtimes explained about half of the difference in soda consumption seen between the high- and low-income families, according to the study. Not letting kids drink soda whenever they want explained about a third of the difference, and not having soda in the home explained 16 percent of the difference, according to the study.

"It makes sense that the home environment and home 'policies' or limits related to soft drinks will have the biggest impact," on soda consumption, said Kate Dickin, a nutritional science research at Cornell University who was not involved in the study. "Our behavior is very strongly influenced by our environments," Dickin said.

The study also revealed that telling children of this age that soda is unhealthy, and refraining from drinking soft drinks in front of them, are unlikely to make a difference.

"Although modeling and explaining why foods are unhealthy can be important, not having any soda in the house or on the table is clearly the most effective way to prevent consumption," Dickin said. If the soda is right there, it’s a lot harder to for parents — especially tired, stressed or distracted parents — to say "no," she said.

The study was limited in that it was conducted with a specific group of parents, and relied on their reports of their own behaviors and how much soda their kids drank.

How to make healthy choices appealing to kids
Dickin said it's helpful when parents understand how to create a home environment that offers kids healthy choices.

"Young kids respond well to simple ways to make a healthy beverage seem special — a pretty cup, a citrus slice, or a drinking straw. Healthy eating is enjoyable and can be presented that way — to parents and to children," she said. "Framing it in terms of restriction and deprivation gets us nowhere."

Dickin said that by looking only at soft drink consumption, the study might have missed part of the picture of what kids are drinking. "Replacing soda with other sugar-sweetened beverages doesn’t help, so it would have been useful to know about all sweetened drinks."

Still, "it’s great to have more evidence of the importance of shaping the home environment as a means for parents to influence child behaviors," Dickin said. Cornell offers an education program for lower-income families focused on learning to make healthier choices.

"We hear back from a lot of parents that these approaches are really effective," Dickin said.

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Men who drink sugar-sweetened beverages, including sodas and non-carbonated fruit drinks, may have a higher risk of heart attack, a new study shows.

Harvard researchers found that men who drank one sugar-sweetened beverage per day had a 20 percent increased risk of heart attack compared to those who eschewed the sugary drinks, according to the study published in the journal Circulation.

And the risk rose with increasing consumption: Two sugary drinks a day was linked to a 42 percent increase in risk, while three was associated with a 69 percent increase.

The researchers also found that sugary drinks were associated with higher levels of inflammatory factors, such as CRP, that are thought to be involved in the development of heart disease.

The bottom line is that Americans need to pay more attention to what they’re drinking, said the study’s lead author, Lawrence de Koning, a research fellow in the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The first thing to do is to reduce the intake of sodas and then eventually eliminate them,” de Koning said.

Related story: 5 great reasons to kick the soda habit

The new research found no connection between artificially sweetened drinks -- in other words, diet sodas -- and heart disease risk. “But there are probably better choices, such as water, coffee and tea,” de Koning said. Besides, another recently published study did indeed find a link between a daily diet soda and heightened heart attack risks. 

This study adds to the accumulating evidence that sugary beverages hurt your health, said Dr. Y. Claire Wang, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

The new report looked at data gathered as part of the Health Professionals Follow-up study, which has been gathering information on 42,883 men for the last 22 years. During that time there were 3,683 heart attacks in the men, some fatal and some not. And although this data set focused solely on men, past research has linked women's soda habits with heart disease, too. 

When de Koning and his colleagues looked at sugar-sweetened beverages, they found a strong correlation between sugary drinks and heart attack risk. And that link stayed strong even after the researchers accounted for factors such as smoking, physical activity, alcohol intake, vitamin use, family history and BMI. 

And while link doesn’t absolutely prove that sugary drinks increase the risk of heart disease, there is evidence from other studies showing that these beverages have an impact on risk factors, de Koning said. In one study, for example, volunteers who decreased sugary soda consumption experienced a reduction in blood pressure levels, he added.

“At the end of the day,” Wang said, “the best thing to drink is still water. 

Related: 

• BPA levels soar after lunching on canned soup
• Still too much sugar in kids' diets, researchers say
• 5 great reasons to kick your soda habit