Sugar Overload!
So, I just noticed someone (enjoying?) a 24-ounce Pepsi for their breakfast beverage. I wonder how many of them someone who drinks one for breakfast has over the course of a day, but I’m going to go ahead and assume if someone is willing to crack one open at 8 in the am, it’s likely a daily occurance. My curiosity piqued, I looked at the nutritional information and calculated sugar consumption over the course of a year.
A 24-ounce Pepsi has 83 grams of sugar in it. Converting at 28.35 grams per ounce, that’s 2.93 ounces of sugar in the bottle. Assuming just 1 bottle per day, that’s going to multiply out to a whopping 66.78 pounds of sugar over the course of a year, just with breakfast alone!
To put that in perspective for those of us who could never imagine drinking a soft drink in the morning, to match that sugar consumption would require stirring 6.7 tablespoons of granulated sugar into your coffee every day.
On a completely unrelated topic, I wonder why both obesity and diabetes are on the rise?
March 4th, 2010 at 11:05 am
All carbohydrates including sugar yield 4 calories per gram and since the only calories in soft drinks come from sugar, each 24 oz. soda has 332 calories. If you assume 1 bottle per day for the year, that would be 121,180 calories. For a person to gain a pound, he/she must eat 3500 calories that aren’t burned off. If we further assume that all those calories aren’t burned off, that person would gain 34.62 pounds per year just from drinking 1 24-oz. soda per day. The flip side of this is that we have to burn off 3500 calories that we don’t eat in order to lose a pound. Therefore, this person could lose 34.62 pounds in a year just by replacing the soda with water or black coffee (neither of which has any calories) and not altering their diet or exercise patterns in any other way.
March 12th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
This is a perfect example of “junk calories” — a term I hear nutritionists use.