Nearly three cans a day, about an hour of coaching. Two in three California hospital workers stayed to the last call, but whether they drank less is still unpublished

Cutting back on sugary drinks is hard to do alone, as one of the same group's earlier papers put it. A team working with Sutter Health in Northern California borrowed a method built for a different habit: the short counselling used for risky drinking of alcohol. Their description of how it went was published in JMIR Formative Research on 27 October.

The paper covers 314 full-time employees from 15 hospital campuses, the two arms that received coaching in a larger randomised trial of 604 people that is also testing a ban on selling sugary drinks at work. They averaged about 968 mL of sugary drinks a day, nearly three 355 mL cans, and about four in five were women. Over six weeks they were offered a 10 to 15 minute introductory call, a counselling session of 25 to 30 minutes, and two booster calls of 10 to 15 minutes each, around an hour in all, plus short mindfulness audio tracks for stress and cravings.

Attendance is the paper's firmest result. Of the 314, 87.9% took the first call, 78.7% the counselling session, 71.0% the first booster and 65.9% the last, which beat the team's 60% target. Motivation to cut back, rated from 1 to 10, went from 7.52 to 8.72 between the counselling session and the last call, and confidence went from 7.99 to 8.40 across the two boosters. The coaches, graduate psychology trainees and medical graduates, reached the training benchmark on two of the four skill measures and fell short on the other two. They gave information about seven times a session on average, and sessions with more of it scored lower on partnership and empathy.

The caveats are large. This paper does not report how much anyone's sugary drink intake changed; the authors say that needs the full trial. The motivation scores come from people still taking part, there is no comparison group in these analyses, and the ratings were given aloud to the coach, which the authors admit may have encouraged agreeable answers. The audio tracks were opened 121 times in 12 months, anonymously, so nobody can say how many people used them. Some lowered stress straight after listening, but the introductory craving track did not lower cravings (5.25 before, 5.72 after, p = .83). Two authors report consulting ties to Oura Ring, and one of them a financial interest in EVOLVE Global. Neither company is named as a funder; the money came from the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.