Pop: More of a Danger to Children than Expected

A few years ago when I was helping a school deal with a drug problem I learned that many students turned to drugs because of peer group pressure. Young people want to belong to the group in and be accepted. Nothing is more painful than rejection. One student told me he started using tranquilizers because he couldn't face the taunts and insults of the school yard bully boys. Going to school was a daily ordeal and one filled with tension and stress " Big Fatty" was the taunt that hurt him most. He was overweight.


Nowadays overweight and obese school children are more common place than ever before. The proliferation of instant junk food outlets entice children to pressure their parents to treat them with a fatty burger and a can of cola or fizzy drink. They are the hangout of many a teenager. The food and drink so many are eating and drinking to live is in fact likely to kill them.


We have been warned for years about the dangers of pesticides and fertilizers forming toxic cocktails in the food chain that accumulate in body's fatty tissue and then in due time accumulates to critical mass and triggers a tumor or some form of cancer.


But now the World Health Organization (WHO) has come out with a bombshell of a report declaring war on the fizzy and pop drinks industry because of the high sugar content of their products. This and the relentless advertising on children's television programmes can cause huge demand among young people. In the United Kingdom alone about 13.8 Billion Euro worth of soft drinks are peddled every year most of it to children and teenagers. According to an article by Investigative reporter Sarah Boseley in the Guardian recently , 21% of children 7-10 years old guzzle almost 10 cans of the sugar loaded fizzy every week.


The WHO report takes direct aim at the villain of the piece -the every tempting sugar sweetener that leads to obesity and that can bring on the life threatening Type 2 diabetes noticed on the rise among young people in the Britain and Ireland. Too much sugar consumption can overwhelm the all -important insulin producing mechanism in our bodies that is busy day and night breaking down sugar and effectively getting it out of the body. When it cant cope with the non-stop intake of sugar it gives up then direct insulin injections become necessary.


The kings of the cola and pop industry are understandably blowing their tops with this WHO assault on their billion dollar business worth US$54 billion in the United States. Their empires stretch around the globe. There is no place so remote that a cola or fizzy pop sign will not greet you. They claim the devil is not in their cans of cola and pop. Sugary the drinks may be but the overweight and obesity is due to the sloth, inactivity, and computer crouching of the young people they say. They have summoned the troops to the battle lines to repel this attack as did the tobacco giants to fight off the claims that tobacco caused cancer. They argued that people caused cancer by choosing to smoke. Now the bottle brigade are marshaling the self same arguments. All rivalries and competition between coca-cola and Pepsi were put aside years ago when they joined General Foods, Kraft and Proctor and Gambel to form the International Life Sciences Institute. This is a lobby group that works tirelessly to influence the policies and decisions of groups like the World Health organization to try and curb their health warnings especially when it come to the use of sugar in drinks and food.


Yet in the United States 12% of boys and 11% of girls are obese , this is three times what it was twenty years ago. Sarah Bosely discovered that 9% of boys and 13.5% of girls in the UK are overweight and that over a period of ten years primary school children had a 140% increase in obesity. In Los Angeles the state has ordered all soft drink dispensing machines out of the schools. That's one positive move that should be followed everywhere.


Fr. Shay Cullen is a Columban missionary: PREDA Centre, Kalaklan, Olongapo City. www.preda.org