By Anjali Athavaley
Reuters

The largest U.S. soda makers pledged to slice sugary drink calories by 20 percent in A decade through education, marketing and packaging.

The American Beverage Association, whose members include Coca-Cola Co,PepsiCo Inc, and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc, as well as the Alliance for the Healthier Generation, announced the routine on the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in Ny. The alliance began from the American Heart Association and theClinton Foundation.

Soda makers will reach their goal by 2025 by educating communities to scale back the calories they can be drinking, and offering more zero or reduced calorie drinks including bottled water.

The American Beverage Association will select an impartial evaluator to monitor progress, however it is unclear the number of calories a 20 % reduction would entail.

The measure is going to be based upon sales volume, calories per serving as well as the U.S. census population, said Susan K. Neely, president and chief executive of the American Beverage Association.

“It’d be hard to sustain the progress that is made to date without commitment,” Neely said within a interview.

Such calorie-cutting initiatives usually are not new. In 2006 the American Beverage Association plus the Alliance for the Healthier Generation partnered to reduce beverage calories in schools.

In 2010, 16 of the biggest U.S. food and beverage companies, including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, pledged to eliminate 1 trillion calories with the U.S. marketplace by 2012 and 1.5 trillion by 2015. The experienced businesses are in the CEO-led Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation formed last year to lower obesity.

In January, companies inside the foundation said on the list of collectively sold 6.4 trillion fewer calories in the country in 2012 when compared to 2007. But an analysis by University of Nc researchers, published inside American Journal of Preventive Medicine this morning, indicated that total calories from packaged goods sold to households with children by those companies failed to cover anything from 2011 to 2012.

Government data reveal that 34 percent of adults were obese in 2007-2008.