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).

=======================================

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. ~

============================================

All websites accessed 5/28/2010

Do You Have a Dinner Backup?

A backup can save the day.

Parents often ask me what they ought to do when their child refuses to eat the meal that's been prepared. A backup is almost always my answer.

I don't need a backup anymore because I'm not parenting a defiant eater anymore. But boy, did cottage cheese save my life.

Here's an old post about backups for you to read while I finish my book! And do read this post on Cook. Play. Explore. which describes the author's experience using this technique.

==============================

Cottage cheese gets a bad rap.  It has the misfortune of being thought of as a diet food (and a pretty awful one at that).  But let me tell you how it changed my life.

My daughter likes cottage cheese.  She doesn’t LOVE it, would never choose it over something preferable – something like sushi, steak or even mac ‘n cheese – but when I serve up meatloaf, a spicy chili or a new dish that doesn’t quite make it, cottage cheese is her “go-to” meal.

I learned a long time ago that giving my daughter the option of eating cottage cheese whenever she didn’t want my dinner enabled me to cook whatever I desired.  And that opened up the culinary world to my husband and me – and, as it turned out, to my daughter as well.

Cottage cheese is our backup.  And, sometimes, having a backup is all you need to turn a tense meal around.

Kids have all sorts of reasons to decline your meal: they don’t like it, they don’t feel like eating it today, they’re cruising for some control.  Having a backup eliminates the sting of your kids’ snubs. 

Having a backup means you don’t have to beg, bribe or cajole your kids into eating, you don’t have to cook an alternate meal (or multiple alternates if you have a couple of kids) and you don’t have to worry about starvation.  You can simply say, “There’s always cottage cheese.”

A backup gives your children the safety net they need.

The backup gives your kids control over what they eat because they know exactly what the options are: they eat either the meal you’ve prepared or the backup.

The backup gives your children the freedom to try new foods because they know there’s always an out: the backup.

The backup eliminates the power play.

Your children don’t have to like cottage cheese.

Don’t panic if your kids don't like cottage cheese. There are lots of other foods you can use as a backup: tofu, hummus, plain yogurt, beans (or anything else out of a can that can be consumed without cooking).

Whatever backup food you choose, make sure it meets the following criteria:

1) The backup must always be the same food item. Pick ONE food and only ONE food to use as a backup.  It will undermine your efforts if your give your children choices for the backup of if the backup changes from time to time.

2) The backup must always be available. Use a food that isn’t highly perishable and which you usually stock. Cottage cheese works because it comes in small snack sizes that stay fresh for weeks at a time.

3) The backup must be nutritious.  That way you won’t worry when your children choose it.

4) The backup must be a NO COOK item.  The point is to make your life easier, not harder.

5) The backup must NOT be a preferred food.  Don’t choose cereal, sandwiches, flavored yogurt, or anything else your children would rather eat. You don’t want to give them an incentive to choose the backup. Instead, select something your kids like, not LOVE, and which they find kind of boring.

The backup works by changing the dynamic at the dinner table.  When you set the overarching parameters, and your children make the choices, you alter your interactions so there's no more fighting about food. And your kids end up eating more of what you serve.  Now that's a habit to cultivate!

~ Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits. ~

Kids Eats Q&A: Autism & Picky Eating

I've gotten a lot of questions over the years about how to teach autistic children to eat right.

I am not an expert on autism. Nor am I an expert on raising special needs children. (Remember, I'm a sociologist.) However, I have worked with, and presented workshops to, parents of children who have special needs.

This is what I know for sure: autistic children (and children who are on the autistim spectrum) have the same range of eating issues as children who aren't.

Their eating issues are sometimes more extreme (which makes them more challenging). The problems are almost always more obvious. (So they are easier to identify.)

If you have a feeding issue with your child:

1) Always make sure there is not a medical issue causing the feeding problem

Read My Child Only Eats Cheerios and Puffs: When to Seek Medical Help.

2) Create a strong feeding structure which makes feeding decisions predictable.

This will transfer your child's need for routine from knowing exactly what food she will eat to knowing exactly how eating decisions are made. Remember, children don't like it when decisions feel arbitrary.

Read The BIG Fix and You Can't Make Me Eat It.

3) Communicate your feeding goals CLEARLY

Surprises are your enemy. If new foods is your goal then make sure that you tell your child that you would like him to learn how to be comfortable tasting new foods.Then, reassure him that you'll never make him eat anything he doesn't want to eat.

Read Surprise! Surprise! and Why Some Kids Should Spit.

4) Break your goal down into the smallest, doable steps you can imagine

I once talked to a woman who was having trouble moving her son off of a feeding tube because he was resistant to the idea of putting food in his mouth.

Want to know the first step? Getting him used to being in the presence of a plate of food. That's right. This boy needed to feel comfortable and SAFE around a plate of food so we practiced sitting at the table, first with an empty plate, then with plate with some food.

Read Nix YOUR Negativity.

5) Constantly look for and eliminate PRESSURE

One way to do this is to SHARE control. One woman's child had agreed, at least in concept, to eat ice cream with blueberries instead of just plain ice cream. This was a big step.

We eliminated pressure by eliminating the parent/child interactions. We put the prepared ice cream in the refrigerator (she didn't want the blueberries to be frozen) and the child ate the ice cream when she was ready. 

Read The Pressure-Cooker Problem.

Two books I recommend:

Just Take a Bite: Easy, Effective Answers to Food Aversions and Eating Challenges!

Food Chaining: The Proven 6-Step Plan to Stop Picky Eating, Solve Feeding Problems, and Expand Your Child's Diet

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~