| June 15, 2000
CHICAGO (AP) - Teen-age girls who drink soda - particularly cola - are
far more likely to break a bone, a Harvard study found.
Grace Wyshak, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public
Health and Harvard Medical School, speculated that girls drinking soda
aren't getting enough milk, which contains calcium that strengthens bones.
But she also suggested that a chemical in colas - phosphoric acid - may
actually weaken bones.
The study, published in this month's Archives of Pediatrics &
Adolescent Medicine, was based on questionnaires filled out by 460 ninth-
and 10th-grade girls in a Boston-area high school.
The risk of broken bones was three times greater for girls who drank
carbonated beverages in general and five times greater for active girls
who drank colas. The study did not specify how much soda the girls drank.
Five of the 57 active girls who didn't drink colas suffered fractures,
compared with 38 of the 107 active girls who reported drinking colas.
A spokesman for the National Soft Drink Association, Sean McBride,
said: "We strongly question the results of the journal article."
He said there is no scientific evidence that anything in colas causes
fractures.
The study comes amid growing concern among experts, who say Americans
are not getting nearly as much calcium as they need, in part because they
are drinking soft drinks instead of milk.
"This should be a wake-up call for parents and health care
professionals alike," said Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition at
the Center For Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group.
In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Neville H. Golden, director of the
Eating Disorders Center in the Division of Adolescent Medicine at
Schneider Children's Hospital in New Hyde Park, N.Y., said the study
suggests that "osteoporosis is a pediatric disease as opposed to a
disease of older people and that we can have some impact on it
early."
In a previous study, Wyshak found increased bone fractures among adult
women who drank carbonated beverages.
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