T Debate ESSAY KI What you need to write a perfect essay Your Favorite Drinks CAN Wreck Your Body c ro ssb one s ) a nd ugary drinks don’t just rot our teeth: They can lead to serious diseases. Imag e s ( s od a ); s to ck Shutter ( sk ull S Is it time to put warning R M/Getty labels on them? Two writers face off on the debate.  J ack Ander s en/Photoli b r a ry

scope.scholastic.com • SEPTEMBER 2014 17 put warning labels on soda and other sugary drinks. The California Senate recently passed a bill designed to do just that, and it may soon become a law. Let’s hope it does—and that other states follow California’s lead. WARNING! Why? Because you deserve to Drinking this know when you’re about to put beverage may cause: something in your body that can • Headache make you sick—or worse. • Gas • Mood swings Crazy for ! • Tiredness Our devotion to sugar began • about 10,000 years ago when the • Heart attack people of New Guinea had what • Diabetes turned out to be a bad idea: to grow as a crop. The ancient New Guineans chewed the

raw plant, and, not surprisingly, p hoto s ) they liked it. In fact, they liked it so much that sugar became a part of their religion. According to one YES! myth, a stalk of sugarcane was the Putting warning labels on sugary drinks mother of the human race. would save lives By Russ Lloyd Humans have been in love with sugar for centuries, but it was only here is a killer on the loose. contain an enormous amount of recently that we began consuming c ro ssb one s ). PAG E 19: i s to ckp hoto. c o m ( a ll

It lurks in grocery stores sugar. What’s so bad about sugar? it in crazy amounts. In the 1800s, a nd and restaurants. It may Well, it can rot your teeth and turn the average American consumed have found its way into your liver into a grotesque lump of about six teaspoons of sugar per Tyour house. Perhaps, as you read scar tissue. Eating too much of it day. Today, the average American these words, it is right next to you, can lead to obesity and put you at eats more than 22 teaspoons of waiting for the chance to strike. risk for heart disease, diabetes, and sugar a day. That’s 77 pounds per This killer is not a flesh-eating so many other health problems year—a mind-boggling amount. zombie. It is not a deadly parasite, a that to list them all here would fill Imag e s ( ca n); Shutter s to ck ( sk ull poisonous snake, or a mutant bee. up the page. Dr. Robert Lustig, a The More You Eat It is a can of soda. pediatrician and expert on how Why are we eating so much

sugar affects the human body, calls sugar? T urudu/ E +/Getty Sugar Kills the stuff “poison.” One reason is that about 40 Em r a h The problem with soda and It’s not surprising, then, that years ago, a bunch of scientists

other sweet drinks is that they some people in California want to and government officials began PAG E 18:

18 Scholastic Scope • SEPTEMBER 2014 telling Americans that APPLE? The Worst in any form is bad, drinking a lot the fat in our food was OR APPLE But wait. of sugar is particularly terrible. making us fat. So we JUICE? Isn’t it unfair to The body absorbs the sugar in started eating more Fruit has a lot single out sugary liquids more quickly than the low-fat foods. of sugar. Fruit drinks like soda when sugar in solid food. When you chug But food without juice has a lot of sugar is added to so down a bottle of soda, you send sugar. What’s the fat tends to taste like difference? Fruit many of the foods we a truckload of straight to cardboard—unless has fiber that eat every day? your liver. (Fructose is a sweet type you sweeten it. So allows sugar to be The answer is no. of sugar that occurs naturally in sweeten it we did. Now absorbed slowly. Sugary drinks are fruit and . It is found in most Juice has no fiber. sugar seems to be in Drinking juice is by far the biggest sweeteners, including everything. like a sugar shot source of and high fructose corn .) Unfortunately, sugar right to your guts! in the diets of young Some of that fructose turns into is addictive. The more Americans. Exactly fat, which can build up in your you eat, the more you how much sugar is OK liver. The same thing happens to want. In fact, brain for kids depends on alcoholics after years of drinking. scans reveal that eating factors such as their sugar affects the same age and height, but Warning Labels Work parts of the brain as the American Heart You know who doesn’t want addictive drugs. Some Association puts it warning labels on sugary drinks? research shows that somewhere between The beverage corporations that sugar is even more addictive than four and nine teaspoons for the spend hundreds of millions of cocaine! (If you’ve ever lifted your entire day. dollars trying to get you to buy cereal bowl to slurp down that last A single 12-ounce can of soda their drinks. The fact that these bit of sugary milk, you can see how contains a whopping 8 teaspoons! companies are against warning this could be true.) While consuming a lot of sugar labels is as good a sign as any that labels will work. But in case we need more evidence, there’s also this: Anti-smoking measures, including warning labels, are % % estimated to have saved about 8 million American 67 85 lives since 1964. of EIGHTH of middle graders schoolers That’s 8 million people have have a who didn’t die because access to sugary they heeded warnings that sugary drink at drinks at O12-NEOUNCE least once smoking would kill them. schooL a week How many lives might SODA warning labels on sugary A DAY drinks save? • can increase your risk of a  heart attack by % Sources: JAMA Pediatrics Study and The California Center for Public Health 30 scope.scholastic.com • SEPTEMBER 2014 19 warning labels on our drinks, what will we put warning labels on next? Sugar is in everything. Should we put warning labels on every box of cereal, every jar of tomato sauce, every package of bread? How about on apples? One apple contains about 21 grams of sugar—more than half the sugar in a can of soda. Having too many labels defeats the point; the more warning labels there are, the less impact the warnings will have. Beverage companies are already making efforts to help Americans be healthier. Coca- Cola, for example, displays calorie counts on the front of nearly all of its packaging, and it sponsors more than 280 physical activity and nutrition education programs around the world. NO! Should beverage companies Let us enjoy our sweet drinks in peace really be punished with obnoxious By EVAN COOK warning labels? There’s no guarantee that arning labels on As a nation, we must take steps warning labels will even work. sugary drinks? That’s to better protect our health. But Psychological studies have shown, a ridiculous idea bombarding soda drinkers with for instance, that for cigarette that won’t solve warning labels won’t help. smokers, warning labels that tell Wany problems. Yet, that’s exactly them they’re going to die might what lawmakers in California are Wrong Approach tempt them to smoke more. The proposing. First of all, soda is not the only fact is that people who love soda Don’t get me wrong. Sweet drinks cause of obesity. Not even close. are going to keep drinking soda. are a problem. More specifically, Inactivity and overeating can Besides, there’s already a obesity is a problem—a very serious both contribute to obesity. And warning label on every sugary problem—in the United States. as a representative for CalBev, drink—and on pretty much every Some 17 percent of kids and a third California’s branch of the American food and beverage product sold of adults are obese, according to Beverage Association, points out, in the U.S., actually. It’s called the Centers for Disease Control and “Only 4 percent of calories in the “Nutrition Facts,” and it includes Prevention. And obesity is a leading average American diet are derived everything anyone could possibly

cause of diseases such as diabetes directly from soda.” want to know about what’s in the H ollin gsw orth/Cor b i s

and heart disease. Second of all, if we start putting thing they’re about to eat or drink. J ack

20 Scholastic Scope • SEPtemBER 2014 A Better Solution If lawmakers are so convinced What Do You Think? Should sugary drinks have warning labels? that they have to stop us from Identify the supporting evidence each author uses drinking sweet beverages, then in his argument. Write the information on why not try something that could the lines below. actually work: a soda tax. A big reason why soda is so popular is that it’s so cheap. A tax would make it expensive, and people Yes NO Those drinks are dangerous! Who needs the sugar police? wouldn’t want to buy so much of it. In a 2009 article in The New 1 Sugar is addictive. 1 England Journal of Medicine, professors Kelly Brownell and Thomas Frieden found that taxing soda just one penny per ounce could lower soda drinking by 10 percent. That makes sense. Cigarette taxes have already proven successful in reducing smoking. 2 Plus, the money earned could go 2 toward helping to fight obesity.

Leave Us Alone Before California wastes time and money on absurd warning labels, its leaders should consider that other efforts to separate Americans from their favorite 3 3 drinks have failed. In 2012, then New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a ban on selling large-sized sodas outside of grocery stores. The city’s Board of Health passed the law, but it was overturned in court. A panel of judges ruled that the Board of Examine points on both sides of the debate—as well as your own beliefS—and decide what you think. State Health did not have the authority your opinion in one sentence below. This can become the thesis statement to tell people what to buy. for an argument essay. In other words, the government has no right to mess with our drinks. You hear that, California? Back off. Get this • activity take this Activity further! WRITE AN Online essay using our Scope Template.

scopeSchola.scholasstticic.co Scopem • • SE APPTEMRIL B26,ER 20102014 21