Last week, I gave my kids each a can of Coke and two sugar cubes for breakfast. I've been serving this to them regularly, although in my defence I didn't know it.
The meal I've been putting on the kitchen table looks like a tableau straight out of a breakfast commercial: Nutella on toast, a bowl of Frosted Flakes, a glass of orange juice. But the combined amount of sugar is a revolting, parental-guilt-inducing 47 grams, the same amount you'd get from washing down a pair of sugar cubes with a Coke.
Of course, you might say, a sugary cereal and chocolate smeared on bread, what was I thinking? But the juice was the worst offender, by a wide margin and it was 100-per-cent O.J., not from concentrate.
You may have thought, given the marketing, that juice is an "all-natural" part of a healthy breakfast, that it is just as good as, or not much worse than, actual fruit. You would be wrong. Last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics released new guidelines that all but ordered parents to swat juice boxes out of their kids' hands, stat.
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According to data from the most recent Canadian Community Health Survey, kids consume 33 teaspoons of sugar a day, far above the World Health Organization's recommendation that sugars ideally make up 5 per cent but no more than 10 per cent of a person's daily calories.
