Juice bad?
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- March
- 17
It seems like the more I read about sugar, the more confusing the issue of juice becomes.
I mean, it’s pretty easy to figure that anything with corn syrup — high fructose or otherwise — should be avoided whenever possible when feeding the little ones. I try to avoid it whenever possible when feeding myself. But do you read food labels? It ain’t easy to avoid the big CS.
And I love the foods that, if you read far enough into the label, have high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup AND plain old sugar. And maybe molasses and/or corn startch, too! Woo-hoo! Sugar party in my stomach.
But in feeding my children, I figure the more natural I go, the better. So we never buy juice drinks (that’s like cheese food. look, it’s either cheese or it’s not. sorry, I digress). We only buy 100 percent juice.
Look, I know there’s lots of (natural) sugar in those juices. And it’s more concentrated than it is if they just ate the fruit.
Many people think of juice as an essential part of a child’s diet. However, juice isn’t as healthy as people (read: me) think.
Check this out from UCSF (University of California – San Francisco):
Drinking a lot of juice makes younger children feel full quickly. Feeling full from juice will decrease the amount of food a child eats. For older children, drinking a lot of juice doesn’t usually cause fullness and the excess calories from juice can result in weight gain.It’s much healthier to eat the fruit rather than drink the juice. For example, a 12-ounce glass of orange juice, which is the juice of two to three oranges, has about 180 calories . But eating one orange is only 80 or 90 calories and it does more to fill you up.
For children who are overweight, the basic recommendation is no juice.
The part about making younger children feel full quickly is interesting. My toddler is basically a bottomless pit, but the preschooler is a skinny minnie and is always explaining how he’s “full.” I think more often than not he’s just trying to get out of eating, but maybe sometimes he’s just had too much juice. Food (pun unavoidable) for thought.
Of course, if it were so easy to just get them to eat the fruit instead of drinking the juice, I’d be happy to. Bananas are popular, and Rafael will eat apples and some berries, but citrus fruits aren’t too popular yet.
The other problem with juice is the stains it puts on Rafael’s teeth; he will only drink apple or orange juice, and I never thought those could stain teeth, but they do. And he hates the dentist. I wondered what the alternatives were. This blog actually gave me quite a few ideas, including adding some fruit juice to seltzer or water, basically giving them water but with fruit flavor. Not a bad thought.
I’ll have to give some of these a try and I’ll let you know how it turns out.
2001 file photo, The Journal NewsÂ
This entry was posted
on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 1:36 pm by Amy Vernon.
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Thanks for highlighting my sugar article, Amy.
Interestingly—the tip about mixing juice with seltzer is the way that I got my husband off drinking juice as well. He now drinks the seltzer plain and prefers it that way. Recently, he poured himself a glass of juice and found it startlingly sweet. He had gotten so used to drinking flavored seltzer that he didn’t even like juice anymore. This is a great way to wean anyone off of juice or soda since it can be done gradually and you control your own sugar content.
Another popular one on my blog is http://drrobyn.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/hey-sugar-sugar-how-much-sugar-is-in-my-childs-juice/
Thanks for visiting—please come again!
Warm regards,
Dr. Robyn
I do think that juice is a serious problem when it robs your child of her appetite. Pumpkin’s doctor in our last visit in December thinks the juice might be why she’s not gaining as much weight as she probably should.
The challenge is weaning them off the juice. I always mix half water and half apple juice, but it’s still a lot of juice over the course of the day.
But when I put less juice in, she gets irate and hands me back the sippy with a command: “more juice.”
I really wish I had never even started with the juice!