By Anna Burns-Francis
A research team at John Hopkins University, in the United States, have discovered a new way to warn teenagers about how much soft drink they're consuming – by using the threat of exercise.
The researchers looked at three different fizzy drink warning signs in dairies – one showing the calorie count, another the percentage of your daily intake, and the third how long you would have to run to burn it all off.
The scientists worked out that it would take 50 minutes of running to burn off one can of drink.
“I think very few people make the connection between energy in, in terms of drink or food and how much it takes to burn that up,” says Winsome Parnell, of Otago University.
The study in the US showed that when customers realised it was nearly an hour's worth of jogging, 40 percent of them decided to drink something else.
“For people who buy soft drinks, then knowing how many calories you need to run off to consume the soft drink sounds a very sensible way of giving them the information they need,” says Robyn Toomath, who leads a campaign called Fight the Obesity Epidemic.
Overseas, lawmakers in France are about to pass a soft drink tax and even one of our food industry's most ardent critics thinks soda manufacturers could be convinced the exercise labels are a good idea.
“They may be happier with this sort of label then for example a traffic light label because the last thing the food industry wants is a red dot on their food indicating that it is unhealthy,” says Food labelling advocate Sue Kedgley.
For now though, shoppers concerned about their waistline will just have to be savvy when reading labels.
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