In U.S. soda scuffle, experts say it's no easy choice

At Andrea Giancoli's community nutrition classes, participants bring in cans and bottles of whatever they typically drink every day, from sodas and fruit juices to sweet teas.

Then the Los Angeles-based dietician helps them read the back of their containers for portion size, calories and sugar content. Then one by one, she stacks sugar cubes by their drink so they can visualize what they are swallowing.

Sometimes she has to stack as many as 25 cubes - nearly 400 calories worth. That's far more than a usual serving of one or two cubes most people use in a cup of coffee or tea.

"They don't often equate what they drink with calories. They just equate what they eat with calories, so that has to be explained," said Giancoli, who has taught such classes for more than a decade to a variety of students, some already grappling with weight issues or diabetes. Many are low-income or elderly.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recent plan to restrict cup sizes for sugar-sweetened beverages to 16 ounces (47 centiliters) has reignited debate over what health advocates call "liquid candy."

The focus on sugary drinks comes as two out of every three Americans is overweight or obese and policymakers take aim at sugary drinks, from New York City's cup-size restriction to new efforts to impose drink taxes and cut sales in U.S. schools.

Policymakers and health activists argue that consumers still have options but that government intervention is needed to help buyers make better decisions that improve public health and stem the nation's costly obesity crisis. The beverage industry has countered by stepping up its defense of consumer choice.

But nutritionists, marketing experts and others who study people's drinking habits say cutting back on sugary drinks is not so easy. Understanding drink labels and calculating serving size and calories is increasingly tricky, they say.

"It can be confusing," said Angela Ginn, a Baltimore-based dietician.

"The biggest thing is they don't understand 'What's good for me?' or 'What's bad for me.' They read the outside of the packaging but not the back of the label," said Ginn, who like Giancoli is a registered dietician and part of The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, a professional group for dieticians.

While sales of soft drinks have declined in recent years, sales of sports drinks, juices and other non-carbonated beverages have grown.

Americans on average drank 714 8-ounce (24-centiliter)servings of carbonated soft drinks last year - about 9 billion cases, according to Beverage Digest, a leading beverage industry newsletter. Sales of other, non-carbonated drinks, including bottled water, reached about 15 billion cases.

STRUGGLING WITH SERVINGS

"We do a lot of education around portion control, front of pack labeling ... we offer consumers a lot of choices," Simon Lowden, chief marketing officer for PepsiCo Inc's PepsiCo Beverages Co, said at a recent industry conference.