Commentary: Sugary drinks make our water crisis worse

As presidential candidates prepare their platforms addressing climate change and our dwindling water resources, it is more important than ever to add sugary drinks to the conversation. The solutions to today’s water deficit crisis must tackle the increasing epidemic of sugary drink consumption.

For individuals, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a report published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, recommends drinking plain water instead of sugary drinks to prevent diabetes, tooth decay, obesity and heart disease, issues that cost us more than $17 billion in healthcare each decade. However, while Americans overuse water for industries like agriculture, we are not drinking it. Instead, we are drinking sugar-sweetened beverages.

Mounting evidence suggests that we turn to sugary drinks when we don’t have access to clean, safe and palatable water. Distrust in tap water, low tap water consumption and high sugary drink consumption are common among communities that have historically lacked piped water services or suffered from water safety breaks. When bottled water is not available, people who do not trust their tap water or lack piped water at home tend to opt instead for prepackaged sugary drinks.

More than one-third of Americans feel unsure about drinking their tap water. Forty-six million Americans live with water insecurity — meaning they don’t have running water or that the water in their homes is unsafe to drink.

A 2023 study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics demonstrated that families provided with a low-cost water filter started trusting the tap water enough to drink it and simultaneously decreased their sugary beverage intake. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the water crisis has contributed to a sugary drink and diabetes epidemic.

Demand for sugary drinks has also exacerbated the worldwide water crisis. The production of sugary beverages is an enormous waste of our dwindling supply of fresh drinking water.

Vast amounts of water are required to grow crops such as corn and sugarcane for the sweeteners commonly used in sugary drinks. Bottling a meager liter of soda uses 442 to 618 liters of fresh water, according to experts. In a Colombian municipality that houses a new Coca-Cola bottling plant, the company has been reported to consume 68.5% of the municipality’s entire water use.

In India, Coca-Cola has been called out by researchers for continuously operating plants in severely water-stressed areas, depleting the aquifers.

In Brazil, advocacy groups and private citizens are concerned that Nestlé and Coca-Cola may negotiate for the rights to the Guarani Aquifer, one of the largest freshwater reservoirs in the world. While this claim is heavily denied by the same companies (who also deceivingly claim water neutrality), it is common practice for governments, such as the one in Puerto Rico, to allow corporations to use unlimited freshwater resources at no charge in their municipalities while their citizens lack access to safe, potable drinking water. (Not to mention, bottled beverages have led to a waste management and contamination crisis). Is it a surprise, then, that the places that are running out of water, like Bogotá and Mexico City, also happen to have the highest consumption of sugary drinks?

Strategies to address water scarcity and sugary drinks must align — only then can they benefit the planet and its people. For example, Brazil has a proposal to institute strict agro-ecological zoning laws for growing of sugarcane and plans for the sugar and its byproducts to generate bioethanol.

Similar approaches to address water and sugary drinks are long overdue in the United States. The 2024 Farm, Food, and National Security Act reflects the needs of sugarcane farmers, and the Biden Administration has made historic investments in water infrastructure.

And yet, these initiatives remain disconnected; the outputs of one potentially become obstacles to the goals of the other. Our shot at tackling water scarcity is drying up fast if we fail to recognize the interconnected impacts and opportunities linked to sugary drink production and promotion.

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Uriyoán Colón-Ramos is a scientist and Associate Professor of global nutrition at the George Washington University and a Public Voices Fellow at AcademyHealth & The OpEd Project. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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