Buck the fizz

There’s an ongoing debate in nutrition circles about the effect of sugar-sweetened drinks (non-diet fizzy drinks) on body weight.

The issue first came to prominence in the US, where the marked rise in obesity rates over recent decades coincided with a rise in consumption of soft drinks from the 1960s onwards.

Of course, lots of other things have changed since the days of free love and moon landings, so even though this research suggested an association between obesity and sugared-drink consumption, it wasn’t really possible to prove a causal link between the two. And that’s how things stood until relatively recently.