Skip Navigation

(February 17, 2012)

Working off the soda


Three sodas, red, yellow, and orange, lined up together
Listen to TipAudio

Interested?
Take the Next Step

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

How much exercise do you need to burn off the calories in a typical soda? Researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health wanted to see what inner-city teenagers would do when they found the answer to that question. The researchers had posters put in convenience stores, which told teens the amount of jogging they would have to do. The study found teens then bought fewer sugar-sweetened sodas, and more water.

Researcher Sara Bleich says it’s better to avoid calories than to lose them:

“It may take you 5 minutes to drink a bottle of soda. But if you are a typical adolescent weighing 110 pounds, it would take you 50 minutes of jogging to burn off that bottle of soda.” (8 seconds)

The study in the American Journal of Public Health was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Learn more at hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: February 17, 2012