12-oz caramel macchiato = 23 grams of sugar http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/espresso/caramel-macchi...

12-oz can of coke = 39 grams of sugar http://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/coca-cola-products/c...

And since it's autumn, it's now time for their signature seasonal drink, the pumpkin spice latte, 300 calories and 39g of sugar per 12oz: http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/espresso/pumpkin-spice-.... You can bring that down to 240 calories and a mere 37g of sugar if you ask for no whipped cream.

Even if you're overweight, a latte is more nutritious and likely to make you feel full than a soda.

I mean, have you ever tried to eat dinner after icecream? It's just not happening, even if it's delicious dinner.

But soda, well, take a 2000 calorie meal and add soda and you have a 3000 calorie meal.

As well, adding a new substance introduces the potential of allergens. I have a dairy sensitivity. If I have a grande latte from Starbucks I'll spend the next hour in a haze. I can have it, but it's worse than just sugar in many respects. But the equivalent soy latte leaves me refreshed. For some people the opposite might be true.

A latte for example in Paris or Barcelona is no more than ~6oz or so, maybe less whereas Starbucks USA they start at 8oz and go up to 24oz. I have not visited a Starbucks here to see the sizes. Every coke I've ordered has come in a 8oz bottle as well unlike the unlimited refills and or big-gulp sizes seen in the USA.

I'm an adult, I can pay attention to what I order, and I'm not embarrassed to order things that are not directly on the menu. I'm tipping the bartender and the barrista so they make it the way I want it anyway.

Besides that, some categories of obesity have plunged:

"U.S. Childhood Obesity Rates Fall 40% in Decade"

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023048347045794053...

Adult obesity rates have leveled off for the last several years. I don't believe it's a coincidence things are moving in a better direction at exactly the same time Americans started drinking less soda (such that both Coke and Pepsi have been seeing declining sales in the US market for the last few years). What Americans aren't doing less of, is consuming fewer coffee products - they're drinking vastly more than they were ten years ago. If that were fueling obesity we'd be seeing a continued increase in obesity among adults.

Further, the obesity rates skyrocketed starting from the early 1980s. They trace almost perfectly inline with soda, fast food, and high fructose corn syrup. They don't follow any line with the vast array of coffee products, which only took off in the mid to late 1990s.

Yes and no; if you go into Pret with a kid they will give you a free "babycino" which is some sort of caffeine-free but presumably fat- and sugar-laden hot drink. Kids are being trained early on to drink this stuff.

I'll also add that if you drink juice, you can consume a lot more sugar than if you ate the fruit - eating the "whole" fruit you'll feel full quicker.

If a beverage has a certain number of calories from sugar per volume, it doesn't really matter whether it's cola-flavored, orange-flavored, vanilla-flavored, tea-flavored, natural-flavored, artificially-flavored, carbonated, uncarbonated, caffeinated, or uncaffeinated. They're all functionally soft drinks, from a dietary perspective, but the graph that charts the decline in carbonated soda does not show the other members in this group.

.

B)

I actually harbor a hypothesis that I have not seen explored which would explain this even if we take it on face value. Contrary to traditional sources of sugar and starch, sweet beverages cause an absorption of sugar unimpeded by the normal vagaries of digestion - there's no chewing, nothing to slow a person down, no cell walls to slowly break down in the stomach, no fiber to absorb and slowly squeeze out the calories.

In the 90's, I used to drink two or three liters of birch beer for something to do while waiting for the pizza. You can keep pouring orange soda into a human body without complaint, long after they would have vomitted up a sugar-equivalent cherry pie. And often our behavior shifts to adopting soda whenever we look for a drink, as the default, several times a day.

We know that blood sugar spikes cause insulin spikes, and we know that ghrelin, insulin, & related hormones act together to modulate the hunger & satiety responses.

My hypothesis is that rapid sugar intake via drinks, when combined with our natural impulse to slake our thirst, acts to dysregulate our hunger and satiety responses in the longer term. Through whatever processes, it detaches hunger from ad libitum consumption levels, sufficient that an extra few hundred calories per day is the 'natural' level that affected people, on average, feel they should be eating. 100 extra calories a day over burn rate is about 10lbs/year of gained weight.

.

C) Obesity is a lagging indicator here. People faced with an ad libitum diet find it very, very easy to maintain their weight. There seems to be a nearly universal misconception that baseline gluttony is associated with high weight levels, but that's bullshit. A person weighing 300lbs has roughly the same neurochemical hunger/stress response as a person weighing 150lbs, when you shortchange them each by 500 calories a day relative to their metabolic burn rate: It's just that metabolic burn rate goes way up as one gains weight. Maintaining weight is the default state. The mystery is why people are on average slowly gaining weight, rather than why fat people are not losing weight.

Saturated fats provided the longest sensation of satiety, followed by protein, then high fibre carbohydrates.

Additionally, our livers have the nifty ability to create sure from pyruvate, lactate, glycerol, and glucogenic amino acids through a process called Gluconeogenesis.[2] Loosely, this is handy for the brain which usually uses glucose for energy, except during fasting when ketones are used.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis

Not sure about this. Will depend on the type of (over) eater. Do they over eat because of psychology (stress reaction), do they over-eat due to some hormonal imbalance (lower gut hormone despite eating) and subject keeps eating. Then there's binge eaters. Each of these three types of over-eating have a different "neurochemical hunger/stress response" to a normal person who has eaten enough and stops. [0]

[0] BBC Food, Gabriel Weston MDBS, Truth about Fat ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9dDlKI623E

Carrying around extra fat causes N to go up.

"Getting fat people to go on diets that cause them to lose weight" is approximately as difficult, motivation-wise, as "Getting skinny people to go on diets that cause them to lose weight". It's extraordinarily difficult, because their bodies are screaming at them to go back to the refrigerator.

The novel question to answer is why overeating - consuming more calories than you burn, and thus gaining weight steadily over long time periods - is so much more prevalent now than it was in previous decades. Why people who are already fat are inclined to eat more (much more) than skinny people, is the simply metabolic reality of the body's drive for homeostasis.

There is a healthcare problem, of course, with having fat people around, but the scientific question of what is making them all have weight problems at higher rates than before, is somewhat distinct from the practical problem of how we get the existing fat demographic to lose weight. Aggressive funding of bariatric surgery seems to be the least-bad method of the latter for the moment; Almost nothing else can be shown to work effectively at the levels required, since we're effectively fighting the strongest drive the body has after breathing.

"The novel question to answer is why overeating - consuming more calories than you burn, and thus gaining weight steadily over long time periods - is so much more prevalent now than it was in previous decades."

Environment: more food, less exercise and incidental exercise. There is one intriguing idea, our bio flora (microbiota) is evolving and it's effecting us. ~ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-h...

Check out the fruitarian, 80/10/10, and plant-based diet.

You probably can find the research studies behind your hypothesis covered at nutritionfacts.org.

Because it's not just about calories in but calories out too. People spending all day sitting in front of screens replacing all other forms of both work and play...

The amount of subsidies and preferential treatment we give to cars is really astounding, but at this point most people in the US can hardly think of it being any other way.

I ask because for example Singapore has extremely harsh labeling and yet they've seen an increase recently.

Sorry if I mis-understood your point.

https://www.moh.gov.sg/content/moh_web/home/pressRoom/Parlia...

Warning!! THESE LABELS ARE GROSS!!! https://www.google.es/search?q=singapore+cigarettes+labels&t...

The last time I smoked, a pack of cigarettes cost about $2.50. Now it's over $7.

> Most consumers aren't idiots. But they're aren't scientists or academic researchers for the most part either. Bring them relevant, accurate information and they are capable of making rational choices.

In the US, cigarettes have had warning labels for almost 50 years and still ~20% of the population smokes.

While 20% of the population still smokes, the incidence rate has hugely decreased over time[0].

According to the CDC, in 1965, ~43% of the population smoked. In 2011, it was just under 20%, with a goal of 12% by 2020.

Transparent labeling, increased regulation and awareness, plus general advances in understanding the consequences of smoking have had a massive effect on the rates of smoking. It's not perfect, but a similar reduction in obesity over the next 50 years would be an incredible accomplishment.

Now if only we could tackle that burgeoning mental health problem...

[0] - http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/cig...

And sports drinks, energy drinks, and flavored waters are certainly part of it.

Personally, I'm a big fan of soda stream. :)

A recent study showed that people in earlier years ate the same number of calories but were still thinner.

It's more complex than calories.

I suspect they're going to find that nicotine (lack thereof in current society) is the culprit.

That's not to say we should go back, but it's not just "calories".

Compared to driving everywhere, sitting at work, etc...

The question now is, what is it? Could it be that the difference in food – not just caloric value of intake – has an influence? Did people start eating more prepackaged foods? If yes, what specifically influenced it? Why did it not influence Europe nearly as much?

Also the obesity rate in children is down, which is encouraging: http://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2015/15_0185.htm

They moved to using erythritol. I drink the products and have yet to find any counter evidence erythritol isn't drastically superior to pretty much every other sweetener. It has been shown to be very safe (with studies spanning multiple decades now), very little of it is metabolized, and it doesn't cause the gastric reactions that competing products like xylitol do.

Percentages of adults within these categories [Overweight, Obese, Extremely obese] increased gradually until the late 1970s, at which point they began to climb more quickly, leveling off somewhat around 2000.

(Scroll down to the section titled "Trends in Overweight and Obesity among Adults, United States, 1962–2010")

Different reality in France