This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Related letters  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Medical Practice  • Health Policy  • Patient-Physician Relationship/ Care  • Patient Education/ Health Literacy  • Pediatrics  • Adolescent Medicine  • Obesity  • Statistics and Research Methods  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

To the Editor: In their Commentary, Drs Allison and Mattes¹ suggested that current evidence does not support a relationship between nutritively sweetened beverages (NSBs) and adiposity and that no policy recommendations should be made to reduce NSB consumption. However, we believe that they misrepresented the evidence.

The authors characterized prospective epidemiologic studies as inconsistent by comparing an 8-year study of 51 603 women showing a robust positive relation between NSB consumption and weight gain (reference 1 in the Commentary) to a 6- to 12-month study of 1345 children aged 2 to 5 years with very low NSB consumption showing no significant association (reference 4). A systematic review concluded that there is a positive association between consumption of NSBs and weight gain.² Adjustment for total energy intake accounted for the weight gain.

Allison and Mattes argued that policy and recommendations should be based on randomized controlled trials, and they acknowledged that in . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Vasanti S. Malik, MSc
vmalik@hsph.harvard.edu

Walter C. Willett, MD, DrPH; Frank B. Hu, MD, PhD
Department of Nutrition
Harvard School of Public Health
Boston, Massachusetts

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLE

Nutritively Sweetened Beverage Consumption and Obesity: The Need for Solid Evidence on a Fluid Issue
David B. Allison and Richard D. Mattes
JAMA. 2009;301(3):318-320.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

RELATED LETTERS

Nutritively Sweetened Beverages and Obesity
Cara B. Ebbeling and David S. Ludwig
JAMA. 2009;301(21):2209-2210.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Nutritively Sweetened Beverages and Obesity—Reply
David B. Allison and Richard D. Mattes
JAMA. 2009;301(21):2210-2211.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT