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The new year is a time of resolutions and for many, a time to think about health, and one’s diet.
Members and representatives of San Antonio’s Healthy Beverage Coalition joined together on January 6, 2016, to hold an educational press conference on the importance of knowing how much sugar is in the average sugary beverage and to help San Antonio to think about what sugary beverages they are drinking this year.
Dr. Robert Ferrer, Board Chairman of the Health Collaborative, started off the conference holding up a bag of sugar and eating it one spoon at a time, all the while stating that eating the sugar in the bag is about the same as drinking a soda.
Speaking also at the conference were members of the Healthy Beverage Coalition, Bexar County Judge, Nelson Wolff. Wolff explained that his new resolutions for the year included lowering his sugar intake by limiting himself from sugar-sweetened teas and coffee as well as limiting his soda consumption. Wolff also explained that more efforts would be made during the 2016 year to help educate teens and San Antonio youth about sugary beverages through digital efforts, like social media with the largest percent of the coalition’s campaign marketing budget set for 12-24-year-olds.
“Right now many of us are making New Year’s Resolutions,” Wolff said, “That’s why we’re starting off the campaign this week. Over the next couple of months, we hope that thousands of people, young and old, across our community, will make a decision to start small by replacing one or two sugary beverages a day with water or go big by completely cutting sugar from their drinks.”
Studies show that 22% of Latino high school students have three or more sugary drinks a day, making Latino youth at more risk for diabetes, obesity and heart disease. Roughly 39 percent of Latino kids ages 2 to 19 are overweight or obese, compared to 32 percent of all U.S. youths.
Educating Latino youth about the sugar content they consume daily may help them to think twice before consuming that next sugary beverage.
“If we are going to change a system, we have to work together. If we want to not have an obese society we need to reduce soda consumption,” said Ferrer.
To learn more about the campaign, watch the Salud hero story here.
To learn more about how sugary beverages impact Latino kids health, click here.
By The Numbers
1
Supermarket
for every Latino neighborhood, compared to 3 for every non-Latino neighborhood
