PediaSure SideKicks: The Sure Way to Ruin Your Kids' Eating Habits

PediaSure would like you to think that SideKicks will help you balance out your picky eater’s uneven diet.

What SideKicks will really help you do is train your kids' tiny tastebuds away from healthy foods and towards junk. In other words, they'll help ruin your kids' eating habits.

The SideKicks website says:

Each shake is a source of 7g protein, 3g fiber, and 25 essential vitamins and minerals for kids who are growing fine but missing nutrients.

PediaSure SideKicks is a fancy form of sugar water.

  

OK. It is a fancy form of sugar water with added protein. And added vitamins.

Big deal. Kids don't eat nutrients; they eat flavors. And flavors shape habits.

Each bottle of PediaSure SideKicks has 17 grams—more than 4 teaspoons— of sugar.

• One Kellogg’s Pop-Tart Frosted Blueberry has 17g of sugar.
• Three Oreo Cookies (34g) have only 14 grams of sugar. 

In fact, sugar is the second ingredient, after water. Check out the ingredients.

If you have trouble getting your kids to eat vegetables, look at how many sweet foods you feed them. 

• Ask yourself how PediaSure SideKids will help your kids like vegetables.
• Then, read Training Tiny Taste Buds (I've reprinted it below) and see how many foods have less sugar than juice (and PediaSure).

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If you give your kids juice for the nutrients, you would be better off giving them Froot Loops.

Froot Loops has more vitamins than juice.  It also has less sugar – 12g per serving instead of 20-23g in the typical 6.75-ounce juice box. 

Of course, giving your kids Froot Loops every day would teach them the wrong habits, and it would get their taste buds used to too much sugar, but that’s the point.

Most 100% apple, grape, punch and other “kid-friendly” blends have around 3g of sugar per ounce.  For a point of reference, Coke has 3.3g of sugar per ounce.

True, Juicy Juice is made from juice concentrate – a natural sugar -- but your kids’ taste buds can’t tell the difference. 

• According to the USDA, juice concentrate is a euphemism for added sugar. In other words, sugar is sugar.

• 100% juice may give your children 100% of their Vitamin C needs, but that’s only because the Vitamin C has been added.  In other words, it’s fortified sugar.

To drive the point home, here are 10 other delicacies that have less sugar than juice.

Some of these treats have vitamins, and others have less desirable tidbits such as fat and calories, but here is how the sugar stacks up.

Compared to the 20-23g of sugar in the typical Juicy Juice box…

1) Juice Drinks: Capri Sun Original fruit drinks have only 16g of sugar per 6.75-ounce pouch. Even 8 ounces of Sunny D has only 20g.

2) Sweetened Cereals:  A bowl of Fruity Pebbles has 11g of sugar.  Even Count Chocula has only 12g per bowl.

3) Fruit Leather:  One pouch of Stretch Island Fruit Leather, Autumn Apple flavor, has 9g of sugar.

4) Fruit Flavored Candy:  One pouch of Kellogg’s Barbie Fruit Flavored Snack has 13g of sugar.

5) Popsicles: One Dreyer’s Fruit Bar Grape has 20g of sugar.

6) Pop-Tarts:  One Kellogg’s Pop-Tart Frosted Blueberry has 17g of sugar.

7) Cereal Bars: Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain Mixed Berry Bar has 12g of sugar.

8) Donuts:  One Dunkin’ Donuts Strawberry Frosted Donut has 14g of sugar.

9) Flavored Water: One pouch of Capri Sun Roarin’ Waters has only 7g of sugar.(Isn't that a lot for water?) 

Guess what?  Even some chocolate beats juice in the sugar department.

10) Chocolate: 8 Caramel-Filled Hershey’s Kisses have 21g of sugar. One Reese’s Peanut Butter Big Cup has19g of sugar.

Kids come out of the shoot ready for sweet, but you don’t need to encourage it. 

If your kids have a limited palate, especially when it comes to veggies, I recommend you look to juice as a hidden culprit.

In fact, juice is one of the easiest places to clean up your kids' eating act.

Read Juice: Apple, Grape, Punch; Coke Beats Juice.

Juices aren’t all created equal - orange juice has something to offer - but the juices and juice drinks that most kids consume are some combination of apple, pear and/or grape juice.

Even Capri Sun Juice Drink Sunrise Orange Wake Up.

Ingredients: Water, Sugar, Apple and Orange Juice Concentrates, Calcium Lactate, Citric Acid, Water Extracted Orange Juice Concentrate, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Natural Flavor.

Most parents keep their eye on their children's sugar consumption, but look in the wrong places. 

Even though my family loves juice, I have to say: if you wouldn’t serve your kids Froot Loops on a daily basis, remember that juice is worse.  Not only does it generally replace water, but it gives your kids the wrong idea about what is healthy. 

Most of all, juice trains (and trains again) your kids' taste buds to enjoy the flavor they already love – sweet.

So teach your kids to use juice like the candy it is (sparingly and as a treat) and you'll be teaching them the habits they need for a lifetime of healthy eating. In the short run, weaning your kids off sugar might just help them open up to broccoli too.  Read Ways to Wean Your Juice-Fiend.

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

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All websites accessed 5/28/2010

Peanuts, Eggs and Shellfish Before Age One

I gave my daughter eggs before she turned one.

I also gave her peanut butter, shellfish and other foods on the list before she was supposed to eat them. I wasn't being brazen. Quite frankly, I was ignorant. (I really was.)

Now, though, it seems like I did the right thing. (Beginner's luck!)

"Insufficient evidence exists for delaying introduction of solid foods, including potentially allergenic foods, beyond 4 to 6 months of age, even in infants at risk."

That's according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.

In other words: Don’t delay giving your kids peanuts, eggs or any other potentially allergenic food. Once you start weaning, you should feel free to feed away.

What a reversal.

• Old advice: Wait before introducing potentially allergenic foods because it will help reduce your child's chances of developing an allergy.
• New advice: Delaying may increase your child's chances of developing an allergy.   

One explanation is that when you finally get around to giving peanuts to a baby whose introduction to peanuts has been delayed, her immune system treats them as a foreign substance. The attack that ensues is an allergy.

Ditto for the process that happens with eggs, shellfish, milk, tree nuts, fish and other recommended "stay-aways."

The peanut allergy rate in the U.S. pretty low: 0.6%.

In Israel, where infants are often given a peanut-based snack, the peanut allergy rate is 0.06%

“The body has to be trained in the first year of life.”

That's the explanation Katie Allen, a professor and allergist at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute at Royal Children’s Hospital in Australia gave to the Wall Street Journal.

You know my reaction: Your baby's taste buds have to be trained in the first year of life too. 

I'm glad to see some medical advice that doesn't undermine habits.

Early flavor experiences shape your baby's flavor preferences later in life. Delay the range of flavors your child gets exposed to and you may be increasing the odds she’ll be a picky eater.

Remember Early Vegetable Variety: The French Advantage? Compared to German mothers (and American mothers) the French provide an astonishing amount of variety during weaning. They're more concerned about taste development than allergies. And you know the punch line: their kids eat vegetables, and ours...? Not so much.

Most infants go through a phase where they are open to a wide range of new foods.

This stage starts when they are new eaters and ends around nineteen months – two years. Some kids get a mild case of resistance; other kids get a severe case.

If your kids are still in the “I’ll eat anything phase of life,” take advantage of it. Both mother’s feeding practices (i.e. your habits) and your infant’s willingness to accept a variety of foods track from the first years of life. That means, what you do in the beginning is likely to last a lifetime.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~

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Sources:

NIAID-Sponsored Expert Panel. 2010. “Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Management of Food Allergy in the United States: Report of the NIAID-Sponsored Expert Panel.” The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology Volume 126, Issue 6, Supplement, Pages S1-S58, December.

Reddy, Sumathi. “Food Allergy Advice for Kids: Don’t Delay Peanuts, Eggs.” The Wall Street Journal 4 March, 2013. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324662404578334423524696016.html, accessed 3/13/13.

Nicklaus, S. 2009. “Development of Food Variety in Children.” Appetite 52: 253-55.

The Girl Scouts' Answer to Fruits and Vegetables: Mango Crèmes

Another "healthy" cookie. This time from the Girl Scouts.

Have you heard about Mango Crèmes?  According to ABC Bakers, the company who makes these cookies for the Girl Scouts, they are made with Nutrifusion. Whatever that is.

ABC Bakers thinks these cookies are the answer to the fact that:

• 75-80% of Americans do not eat an adequate amount and variety of fruits and vegetables. And
• 87% of American consumers are interested in learning more about beneficial products that can provide a host of health benefits.

 Read what ABC Bakers has to say here.

I wrote about these cookies yesterday on Psychology Today.

You won't be surprised to learn that Mango Crèmes are not any healthier than the other GS cookies. They also don't contain any mango.

What they contain is a cocktail of concentrates: cranberry, pomegranate, orange, grape, strawberry and shitake mushrooms. Yes. Mushrooms! (Maybe they didn't think calling these cookies Mushroom Crèmes would be as appealing?)

Read the rest of my Psychology Today post, The Girl Scouts Miss the Boat with Mango Crèmes.

Adding fruit and vegetable concentrates to cookies is not the way to increase fruit and vegetable consumption.

• Nutrients do not provide the same healthful kick when they don't come in their original packaging.
• Adding fruit concentrate, a euphamism for added sugar, to cookies is like putting icing on a cake: it is adding sugar on top of sugar.
• Eating cookies teaches kids to eat cookies, not shitake mushrooms.

Give your kids these cookies if they like them. (I'm sure they're delicious.) Just don't buy them as a way to be healthy. 

Give your kids cookies with added nutrients because you worry they aren't getting the nutrition they need from "real" foods and you'll train your kids' taste buds away from "real" foods.

Then what will you do? Give your kids cookies with added nutrients to make sure they get the right nutrition? It's a crazy vicious cycle.

For more on this topic, read Cookies and the Cycle of Guilty Eating.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~