At a recent press conference in the lobby of Montefiore Medical Center’s Children’s Hospital, Dr. Philip Ozuah held up a big bottle of soda. “Every day in my practice, children come into my office holding one of these,” he said.

Ozuah, the Chairman of Pediatrics at Montefiore and Physician-in-Chief at the Children’s Hospital, said each bottle contained 400 empty calories. Doctors estimate that drinking one of those bottles each day adds 25 to 30 pounds to an average 9- or 10-year-old per year, he said. “To burn this off, for an average 9-year-old, you’d have to play full-court basketball, be a starter, play every minute of every quarter and play two games a day, seven days every week, 365 days every year,” Ozuah said.

Ozuah, along with other Montefiore leaders, including its president, Steven Safyer, MD, as well as Deputy Health Commissioner Andrew Goodman and union representatives, wanted to hammer home the ill effects of sugar-heavy drinks — like Coke, Pepsi, Snapple, etc. — as they pushed for the governor’s proposed “soda tax.”

Health officials say the tax will cut consumption of sugary drinks by 10 percent, which, in turn, will prevent 150,000 people from becoming obese, Goodman said.

The beverage industry says the tax will unfairly hit poor and working-class families hardest. But health care advocates say these drinks are the primary culprit in the Bronx’s (and the state’s) growing obesity and diabetes “epidemic.” Safyer said the scope of the crisis was akin to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

The fight for and against this proposed state tax — which health officials say would amount to about a 17 percent increase in the cost of sugar-heavy drinks – is being waged on the airwaves. Crain’s recently estimated that the beverage industry (against the tax) and the Alliance for a Healthier New York (for the tax) had each spent some $2.9 million on their campaigns.

Ken Raske, president and CEO of the Greater New York Hospital Association, said the revenue would go back into the state’s struggling hospitals. He pointed to the recent shuttering of lower Manhattan’s St. Vincent’s Hospital as a reminder of what can happen when a facility is “chronically” underfunded. Safyer compared the proposal to cigarette taxes, saying they had proved effective in curtailing smoking.

The state legislature has yet to act on the proposal. So far, Bronx senators Jeff Klein and Ruth Hassell-Thompson have stated their opposition to the tax, while Assemblyman Jeff Dinowitz says he’s for it.

Ed. Note: Mosholu Preservation Corporation, which publishes the Norwood News, is a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore.