The National Institutes of Health is providing a grant of more than $30,000 to the University of Massachusetts Medical School to study parents who let their teenagers drink soda, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
The grant supports a dissertation on sugar-sweetened beverages, or SSBs, according to the grant report.
"Adolescence is an important developmental period to address obesogenic behaviors that often persist into adulthood, particularly sugar sweetened beverage consumption," the grant report said.
Goals of the study are filling "gaps in the literature" about adolescents and the amount of soda they drink. The researchers said soda intake has increased 300 percent over two decades. Teens drink 224 calories of sweetened soda each day, the researchers said.
The project will continue until 2019, the Free Beacon reported.
On Thursday, a study published in Current Biology said that the amount of sweetness regulates what the body does with the calories an item contains.
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