Lazy bloody town and damned sports candy

[ailbhe]

Linnea is really confused by what constitutes "healthy" food and since I explained that fruit contains sugar (we were talking about dental health) she's not sure whether she's ALLOWED to eat fruit any more. I can't see why any child likes bloody Lazytown because it is incredibly irritating and all the people are wholly unattractive and the puppets are horrible, but they do - and it's a bit crazy about the whole food thing.

Sports candy. Fruit is FRUIT, it's not a substitute for sweets and cake. It's worth eating in its own right. And conflating sugar and refined sugar is really annoying.

Comments

[st-lemur.livejournal.com]

What I particularly hate is that kids aren't supposed to have juice now, they're supposed to drink no-added-sugar squash instead. The fuck? Dumping artificial sweetners into kids cannot be the way forward. It might even do real harm, if you subscribe to the theory that you're setting someone's palate up to always want ultra-ridiculously-sweet everything for life.

[the-changeling.livejournal.com]

This is another of my bug bears.

Now't wrong with perfectly normal and natural sugar. Now aspartame... don't get me started!

Just another way to send the wrong signals, including brain ones!

[gloriap.livejournal.com]

Use your own common sense and judgement. My kids were brought up drinking real fruit juices, sometimes watered down, and in their 30s they rarely drink sodas.

If teeth are a concern, brushing or even rinsing well with clear water after drinking is an option.

I would never give a child soda, with either real or artificial sweetener. IMO, It sets up bad eating habits.

There are currently studies being done that point to artificial sweeteners creating more thirst and a craving for sugar and additional sweets.

[ailbhe]

We had fizzy drinks as children and I don't think an of the five of us drink them as adults. They were a treat. My children have been offered them but since they don't like fizz on principle I'm not sure they've tasted any.

The sugar in juice isn't any better than the sugar in Coke, but I believe aspartame is worse... And most of the others are laxatives.

[jentifred.livejournal.com]

Here in the US, the sugar in sodas is generally high fructose corn syrup. So I'd MUCH rather give my kids juice than soda.

I used to have a Pepsi-a-day habit, until I got a hold of some Pepsi Throwback, which was made with cane syrup instead of HFCS. But it was a limited-time run, and I found that just a couple of weeks of sugared-soda was enough to turn my palate off to HFCS soda. I am not complaining.

[jentifred.livejournal.com]

I've been drinking Izze drinks lately. 70% juice, 30% sparkling water. I have yet to find a cola drink I like that's not Pepsi (or, well, now Pepsi Throwback).

They are bringing Throwback back for the holidays I hear, but I think by then I will have thoroughly lost any taste for colas and it would probably be better if I kept it that way. ;-)

[st-lemur.livejournal.com]

I've made my own soda in the past. It's not hard once you find a source for food-grade essential oils, everything else is available off-the-shelf and recipes can be adapted easily from http://www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe.html

[ailbhe]

I'm not at all sure I've ever encountered HFCS in the wild. I don't usually drink fizzy drinks so even when I *was* in the US I probably didn't meet it. Much, anyway. I did find the hotel had no unsweetened breakfast foods except melon and eggs.

[ailbhe]

"supposed to" according to whom? follow the money...

[st-lemur.livejournal.com]

It's on juice cartons from the supermarket, is all I know

[ailbhe]

Ew. That's a leetle crazy. "Don't buy this, buy something more expensive for these health reasons"? Or what?

[biascut.livejournal.com]

I am particularly annoyed about this as it makes it harder for me to buy normal-sugar squash!

[the-changeling.livejournal.com]

Rocks

http://www.rocksorganic.com/

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I don't want recommendations - I just want to be able to get ordinary Robinson's lemon barley water when I'm down the Co-op, but they only have sugar-free versions!

[thealmondtree.livejournal.com]

And even some of the ones that don't claim to be sugar-free still have artificial sweetners in them.

[st-lemur.livejournal.com]

Yes, I hate this as well :(

[ailbhe]

What, really?! Gawd. What about other supermarkets? We pretty much never drink squash unless we're having a birthday party so it's not something I've checked.

It has just occurred to me that they may no longer do a real sugar version; do you suppose that's true?!

(Er, yrs etc, Shocked of Reading, apparently - sorry about that).

[ailbhe]

I checked Tesco - no real-sugar Robinsons. At all.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Tsk! Yeah, that's what our Co-op is like.

It's not that I can't get it at all, but I can't get it reliably just going to the Co-op and the Tesco Metro and things that are in the city centre, which is where we do most of our non-fresh-fruit-and-veg shopping (things like pasta, breakfast cereal, milk, butter, biscuits and so on.) If I were going to the really big supermarkets I'm sure I'd find it, but it's ridiculously frustrating when there are actually half a dozen different types of squash in the shop and every single one of them is aspartame horridness!

[st-lemur.livejournal.com]

I started buying my pickled cucumbers from the Polish shop because the Tesco ones have artificial sweetener in. Anyone know of a source for rollops without sweetener?

[trizia.livejournal.com]

Really, that's ridiculous! Aaaargh!!!!

[astrogeek.livejournal.com]

my kids drink water or milk. There's no need to ffer any kind of fruit/sugar/sweetener based drinks to kids, but once you've started there's no going back.

[astrogeek.livejournal.com]

We'll have to agree to disagree here - while the sugar and calorie content of milk and juice are similar, milk also contains fat, protein, vitamin D and calcium which aren't generally present in most fruit juices in any appreciable quantity. I offer my children (ages 1 and 3) milk to drink because it has dietary benefits beyond just the calories it provides, which juice doesn't (in my opinion).

And as for the "milk is bad" argument - I would love to see one peer-reviewed study, published in the medical literature, that has categorically shown that milk is detrimental to the health of the general population, as opposed to random so-called experts' opinion published in popular newspapers and magazines. Humans have been drinking and cooking with the milk of other species (cows, sheep, goats in particular) for many hundreds of years, and we're still here. I'm not saying it's the best thing for us (but then most of the modern western diet isn't), but (in my opinion) it certainly isn't teh evil that some people seem to have decided it is.

[ailbhe]

We found it very easy to eliminate fruit juice from Emer's diet when she was on a healthy-teeth diet. Much easier than eliminating fresh fruit, which is, of course, much worse for the teeth because you can't bypass them with a straw.

[astrogeek.livejournal.com]

yeah - mine pretty much live on fresh fruit. We'd struggle to get rid of that too.