What’s in a typical 20 oz bottle of soda?
- Serving Size: A 20 oz soda bottle has 2.5 servings. It’s important to look at the Nutrition Facts (right) for the package, not just a single serving, if drinking the entire bottle. A standard serving size is 8 oz.
- Calories: There are 100 calories in one serving and 250 in the bottle. These calories have no nutritional value.
- Sugars: It’s easier to figure out how much sugar is in a drink by changing the grams to teaspoons. Divide the total sugar grams by four (4) to get an approximate number of teaspoons. This bottle contains about 17 teaspoons of sugar (69÷4).
- Ingredients: In this beverage, the main ingredient after water is high fructose corn syrup. Other common names for sugars are cane syrup, sucrose, and dextrose.
Sugary Drinks and Your Child’s Health
- Drinking a 20-ounce (oz) bottle of soda every day can lead to about 25 extra pounds of weight gain a year.
- To burn off the additional 250 calories in a 20 oz bottle of soda, you would have to walk briskly for approximately 60 minutes. Choosing healthier drinks is an essential step in maintaining a healthy weight and helping to reverse the obesity epidemic.
- Sugary drinks are a major contributor to obesity in youth and adults, which can result in the development of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
- In California, 60.7 percent of adults are overweight and 24 percent are obese. Among California’s children ages 2 to 4, 16 percent are overweight and 17 percent are obese.
- The obesity epidemic is affecting our wallets; obesity–related health costs in the United States are estimated at $147 billion annually.