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During our daily subway commute to and from Health Blog HQ, we’ve noticed posters telling us exactly how far we’d have to walk to work off various sugar-sweetened drinks.

Now a study just published online by the American Journal of Public Health makes us think that the NYC Department of Public Health, which is behind the posters, may be on to something.

Researchers wanted to know what would happen to sales of sugary drinks including soda, sport drinks and fruit drinks if they posted calorie information about those drinks on beverage cases at corner stores in Baltimore. They were also curious about whether the way that calorie information was presented would make a difference.

So they rotated three different signs through four different corner stores. One sign pointed out that a bottle of soda or fruit juice has about 250 calories. Another pointed out that such a drink has about 10% of a person’s daily calories. And another pointed out that working off a bottle of soda or fruit juice takes about 50 minutes of running.

The researchers collected data for about 1,600 beverage purchases by black teens — who are more likely to drink sugary beverages and to be obese — across the different information strategies and, for comparison, a baseline period.

Giving any type of calorie information lowered the likelihood of a sugary-drink purchase by about 40% compared to no signs at all, says Sara Bleich, an author of the study and an assistant professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study also found that giving information about the physical activity equivalent lowered the likelihood of a sugary-drink purchase by about 50%.

Bleich says that her sense is that Americans in general have bad numeracy skills — and a bad understanding of what calories actually mean. “Even when you say it has X calories, that doesn’t resonate” if you don’t know how many calories you should be consuming, she says. But even if someone doesn’t know much about nutrition, they may know they don’t want to run for 50 minutes, she adds.

Bleich says more research will be done to get more details on what sugar-sweetened drinks, in particular, saw lower sales associated with the signs and what drinks were bought instead. This study couldn’t tease out those details, though it did note that sales of iced tea and sport drinks went down significantly and sales of water went up.

The study was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Image: iStockphoto

Here is the original: 
Posting Calorie Information On Sugary Drinks Curbs Sales Among Teens