Cure Your Soda Addiction

Warning: You need to run two miles to burn off that bottle of Coke. Tempted to switch to water yet?

People are less likely to indulge in unhealthy beverages when caloric contents are translated into physical activity equivalents, a new American Journal of Public Health study found. In the study, teens were less likely to buy a sugar-sweetened beverage—soda and fruit drinks—if its physical activity equivalent was displayed than if it’s calories or percentage daily values were posted.

“Americans don’t have a good sense of how many calories they need in a day, so translating calories into easy-to-understand physical activity equivalents may be more meaningful to consumers than calorie counts,” said study author Sara Bleich, Ph.D., an assistant professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

More from MensHealth.com: The Eating Plan to Burn Fat and Lose Weight

Unfortunately, we can’t control what’s printed on your soda nutrition label, but we can do the math for you. Your 20-ounce bottle of soda is roughly the same as:

• Washing dishes or grocery shopping for 76 minutes*
• Unicycling or cleaning gutters for 35 minutes
• Jazzercising or chopping wood for 29 minutes
• Shoveling or skiing for 25 minutes
• Boxing or fast jump-roping for 15 minutes

Want to see what the physical activity equivalents are for your other food choices? Check out the Men’s Health Crime & Punishment Quiz.

* Physical activity calculations are based on values from The Compendium of Physical Activities.

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