“Sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of”

Such a cute little quote that people said a long time ago. It is not quoted as much anymore and we know that little girls are not always made with sugar and spice, just like boys are not made from “snips and snails and puppy-dog tails”, right?

But unfortunately, more and more, our kids, girls and boys, are full of sugar.

Where is all the sugar?

It comes in products that we do not think are bad for our children.

When I worked as a teacher in the youngest grades, we had to help the students with their lunches, opening containers and such. It was quite a variety of items in their lunch boxes.

A lot of the students went to the after-school program as well, so their lunch boxes had to have an extra snack on top of their morning snack in the classroom and their lunch for the cafeteria.

It made for a lot of snack items in their bags. If you have young children, you know that they run on snacks throughout the day. Actually, most adults do as well.

Popular items were juice boxes, yogurt, fruits, veggies, snack bars, chips, cookies, crackers, and items like that.  A lot of them are prepackaged items for easy packing on the chaotic mornings.

Now, most people know that chips and cookies have added sugars and fats but they say “everything in moderation”, right?

But what about the juices?

There is a lot of sugar in the juices that we buy for our children. But hey, it is juice, right? Isn’t that good for our children? And for ourselves?

Not necessarily. You really need to read the nutrition labels on these products.

I do not know if I should name brands of juice in this post, so I will go with the statistics instead.

It is up to you, as a parent, to make the decisions of what your children eat. My child would not choose to eat healthy on her own so I have to work fruits and vegetables in where I can and limit junk food.

It is a constant battle in my house to get healthy foods in her to combat the unhealthy foods that she enjoys way too much. This is a battle that parents have been waging for years with their children. I am sure most of you can relate to this.

Juicy facts of sugar

Recently, I went to the supermarket and was looking at the sugar content of juice boxes. I looked at a very popular brand of juice boxes. On the brand’s label it is marked 100% juice. It must be good then, you would assume.

If you read the label though, one box has 14g of sugar. Still not something to go crazy about until you factor in that the serving size is only 4.23 oz.

If you compare that to a 12 oz can of soda, which has around 40 g of sugar (depending on the brand, I used the brand I drink), and equaled out the juice to 12 oz. (3 juice boxes, well that brand would be 12.69 oz.), you would have more sugar in those juice boxes with 42 g of sugar.

I took the information from a few popular brands.

Another brand of juice that I looked at also had 100% juice marked on its label. In a 6.75 oz. box, there are 24 g of sugar. Again, to compare to a 12 oz. can of soda, if you drank two boxes to almost equal out the amount of liquid (13.5 oz. vs. 12 oz.), there would be 48 g of sugar.

Are there any juices with less sugar?

Now, this is not all gloom and doom. There were at least two other brands of juice in my small portion of my study that have less sugar.

One of the brands has only 9 g of sugar in a 6.75 oz. pouch and they put it right out there on their label.

The other one also has a 6.75 oz. box with only 12 g of sugar, also printed on their label.

Where does this all lead?

I am in no way anyone who can preach about the sugar content of foods and drinks. There is no way that I am the nutrition police telling people what to buy and what not to buy.

I am far from a healthy eater. I know it. I own it.

It is more about how they market products to us, the consumer.

100% juice. All-natural. No high fructose corn syrup. No added sugars.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing

What they put on the labels is meant to get the consumer to buy the product. Looking at the labels more carefully, may help us to know what is in the products that we give our families. There are a lot of hidden sugars and fats in items.

We know it in the obvious products…chips…cookies…candy. It is not like we think that any of that is healthy, even though some of the products market them also to look like they are better for you.

Some examples are putting the words “whole grain”, “less fat than regular…(fill in the blank)” or “less sugar than the regular…(fill in the blank)”.

This does get our attention. We lead busy lives and most people do not enjoy grocery shopping. The marketing departments know this and capitalize on it. They use fast, colorful, bolded words. And it works!

Who sits and reads the ingredients? Me, sometimes. It drives my daughter crazy because when I read the ingredients further, it may result in my not buying the product that she wants.

But hey, that is another whole blog post about other additives in snacks geared towards children. It seems never-ending as we try to protect our children.

Being more aware of these marketing techniques or researching more about the ingredients in the food for our children, and families, in general, will help us to know what to buy and serve them. That is what this is about. Either way, the decisions are up to you for your family.

I make the decisions for my family. Some of them are healthy choices and some are not as healthy.

Our jobs as parents are hard enough as it is and our children are sweet enough as they are!

-Image by Jan Mesaros on Pixabay