Soda and More by Judy Lyden

This is a comment I received that is too important to just post and ignore.

"You also think every obese child is because of soda. I have a heavy child you blamed on soda and she never drinks it. I can see your point but it isn't always correct."

In all my years of working with very young children, I have never said that soda only makes a child put on the pounds. Yes, it can be a contributor, but it is not really the culprit in most cases. What I have said, and rightly so, is that I have discovered that many children are drinking too many calories during the day. Too many can often be excessive and this can contribute to too many pounds. If that's soda, it's absolutely true, but it doesn't have to be soda. It can be milk, juice, or other things that kids drink.

Let's look at a child's diet through the day. Many children from infancy will opt to drink rather than eat because drinking is easier to do than eat. If that lazy habit continues into the toddler stage, and then into the preschool stage, it can offset the balance of calories and cause a child to be heavier. Why?

Drinking is a very interesting thing. Drinking is something that allows a lot of calories to enter the body quickly. You can drink 6 ounces of water in about five seconds. That's true for any liquid. That's one of the reasons I think drinkable yogurt is so awful. First, most store bought yogurts are laden with sugar. Many will have as much as 35 grams of sugar in a six ounce container. That's almost nine teaspoons of sugar per six ounces. If you make that drinkable...

Let's look at orange juice. Few people would say that orange juice is bad for you, simply because that would be crazy. Oranges are one of the world's healthiest foods. Check out Worlds Healthiest Foods site; it's a marvel. Now let's look at orange juice closely. It takes about an orange to give you two ounces of juice, and that's a bit of a stretch on some oranges. So if a child is drinking 6 ounces of orange juice, say three times a day, the child is in effect eating 9 oranges in a day. Each orange is about 100 calories, so that the child is consuming 900 calories in orange juice.

Now let's move on to milk. There is no more wonderful food for kids than milk. Some children don't drink milk, and that's a shame because this is an excellent source of vitamin D. At meals, children will often reject dinner and fill up on milk drinking two, or even three glasses. This is a common children's shill. It allows a child to be "temporarily full." We see this every day at school. A glass of milk has 120 calories in it. When you double that, the child is drinking his dinner at 240 calories per meal or more, and that is 720 calories if a child has three meals.

Now let's look at other stuff kids drink through the day. "Mom I'm thirsty," comes the plea. And more than likely, a child will be given a glass of apple juice. Unfortunately, the apple juice is often the 20% kind which is just sugar water. Hi C, Hawaiian Punch, Koolaid, some of the pouch drinks, and a lot of quick snack drinks are lethal, filled with sugar and loaded with empty calories. Look on the side of your juice bottle to see how much real juice is in it.

Through the day, children will come back to the kitchen over and over for this sugar fix. Even those children consuming a lot of real fruit juice is a concern because ultimately, too much juice is just plain fattening. When you use disposible cups and set those cups out on the counter and add them up at the end of the day, you will probably have to add another 600 calories to the rest of the "drink only" pile of now 2400 calories.

When you add 2400 calories to what a child is eating... you're shot before you even get off the ground. I know this because I've watched it for years. I had four children who would drink thousands of calories in real fruit juice every day for years. As a daughter of the golden west, a Californian by birth, I believe that fruit juice is the golden drink, but I also understand that one has to work off those calories. As a believer in "get out, out won't kill you," children need to use their calories playing outdoors hour after hour. Today, that's not always possible, so the golden drink becomes a real liability. An hour at the park isn't going to use up that many calories.

Now let's look at food choices that go with the desire to shill the dinner and escape with a belly filled with drink. There are too many picky eaters today, and I blame a lot of that on junk drinks. Junk drinks say, "It's only good if it's sweet." The sweet expectation is enormous today. When a child really doesn't like the food basics, won't eat meat, won't eat vegetables, won't eat fruit, but likes bread, pizza, potatoes and pasta, all made from white flour and white sugar, the calorie wheel turns at a prodigious rate, and the nutrition level drops like a stone.

What to do?

This is where the parent needs to re-evaluate drink, because drink is what is usually causing the problem. If a child receives water all day and only a single juice or a single milk at meals, the calorie count will drop a lot in most cases. Water will also build up a natural hunger that will force even the pickiest eater to eat at meal time. Second milk or juice at meals? Water makes a nice block to meal avoidance. And how about seconds on veggies and fruit only? For the child who is looking for the sugar fix of pasta, bread, and potatoes, seconds on fruit and veggies only will put on a pretty good brake.

And as a final note, sippy cups are a detriment to child rearing. Throw them out. They ruin teeth, they add a thousand unnecessary calories, and they are bacteria laden, filled with old spit and often snot out in the air and multiplying by the billions. They create all kinds of health issues. Children don't need to drink non stop. Neither do adults, and the example of constant drinking by parents holding what amounts to baby bottles or adult sippy cups is what is causing an obese America.