Reduce the amount of sugar in your kid’s diet!

Today, people eat one hundred and fifty pounds of sugar in a year. That’s two-and-a-half pounds of sugar each week! Eliminating (or at least drasticly reducing) sugars from your picky child’s diet is esential. For the child who’s not eating a healthy variety of foods, this one adjustment will open the door to apprecitating whole foods.

Sugar is produced from sugar cane or sugar beets. In the refining process all the vitamins, minerals, proteins, enzymes, and other beneficial nutrients have been stripped away. Simple sugars cause a drop in the ability of white blood cells to engulf bacteria, resulting in the suppression of the immune system.

The average American consumes approximately 150 pounds of sugar a year: That’s 2½ pounds a week! Beginning with sugar in baby’s formula, people develop a craving for it. It doesn’t take long for little picky eaters to develop a preference for sweet tasting foods. Skinny picky eaters may grow up to be overweight, as their favorite foods often have added sugars.

Sugar is seductive as it may take years before sugar makes you overweight, ruins your pancreas, your adrenal glands, and throws your endocrine system out of whack. Sugar is included in most processed foods. It’s in everything from soup, to cereals, to ketchup, to lunchmeat.

In my book, Baby Bites: Transforming a Picky Eater into a Healthy Eater,” there are practical solutions on how to avoid sugar. First, you must become familiar with all it’s aliases. Buy the Book at the Baby Bites Store Now! Click Here

Sugar is listed on the nutrition label under 40 different names!

Various Names For Sugar Commonly Found in Processed Foods:

• Amaske (brown rice)
• Barley malt (grain)
• Beet sugar (root)
• Brown rice syrup (grain)
• Brown sugar
• Cane juice
• Confectioners’ sugar
• Corn sweetener (grain)
• Corn syrup (grain)
• Date sugar (fruit)
• Dextrose
• Fructooliosaccharides (fruit)
• Fructose (fruit)
• Fruit juice concentrate (fruit)
• Galactose
• Glucose
• Granulated sugar
• High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) — If you were to avoid only one sugar, HFCS would be the one! According to physicians Mehmet Oz and Michael Roisen, high-fructose corn syrup is the worst sweetener added to our food supply. In their book, “ You: The Owner’s Manual…,” they state: “One of the biggest evil influences on our diet is the presence of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a sugar substitute that itself is a sugar found in soft drinks and many other sweet, processed foods. The problem is that HCFS inhibits leptin secretion, so you never get the message that you’re full. And it never shuts off gherin, so, even though you have food in your stomach, you constantly get the message that you’re hungry.”
  
• Honey (natural)
• Juice concentrate
• Lactose
• Licorice Root
• Maltodextrin (corn syrup solids)
• Malted barley (grain)
• Maltose
• Maple sugar (natural sweetener)
• Molasses (natural sweetener)
• Powdered sugar
• Rice Syrup & Yinni Syrup
• Raisin juice (fruit)
• Raisin syrup (fruit)
• Raw sugar
• Sorghum syrup
• Stevia—Stevia is really a healthy sweetener. It’s a herbal sweetener that’s two to three hundred times sweeter than sugar and no calories. It’s presently sold in the U.S. as a dietary supplement, although it has been used as a sweetener for hundreds of years in Latin America, Japan, and Asia and now in Europe.
• Sucanat
• Sucrose
• Sugar cane
• Turbinado sugar
• White sugar
  

Update on Sugar Alcohols and Polyols

Polyols include: Hydrogenated Starch Hydrolysates (HSH), Isomalt, Lactitol, Maltitol, Mannitol, Sorbitol, and Xylitol.

Polyols are slightly better than artificial sweeteners, but in light of the following information, I would strongly caution parents in purchasing foods for your children with Polyols listed in the ingredients.

Polyols are made from sugar. Polyols average 50 percent fewer calories than sugar. Although, they can have adverse side effects: dehydration, equilibrium loss, vitamin and mineral depletion, and malnutrition. Polyols can adversely effect the digestive system with bloating, gastrointestinal distress, diarrhea, and anal leakage at 1 1/2 teaspoons a day. Although in some individuals (possibly more so in children) these side effects may occur at a lower level.

Children have immature digestive systems it’s best to avoid Polyols as well as artificial sweeteners. I would NOT recommend Polyols for children, even though you’ll find them in candy, chewing gum, chocolate, baked goods, cough drops, cold medicines, mouthwashes, and ice cream.