Killing them slowly with sweetness!
Patti-Jean Naylor, assistant professor of exercise science and physical health education at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada is at this moment crunching the data taken from 500 surveys of children in Grades 4 to 6, before and after their participation in an education program but sweetened drinks.
The education program called Sip Smart! B.C., was an initiative of the government-funded B.C. Healthy Living Alliance, which aims to support healthy eating and exercise.
What the group says is that reducing the consumption of sugar sweetened beverages is quite possibly the single best way to combat the current epidemic of obesity in B.C., where one in 4 kids is classified as overweight or even worse, obese.
The children were selected at random throughout B.C. and were confidentially weighed and their heights recorded to determine their body mass both before and after taking the Sip Smart! B.C. program. They also filled out extensive questionnaires about healthy eating.
“The study is not just about obesity,” says Naylor, adding the program also examines children’s attitudes about their food choices. “What we want to see is that the children have reduced their sugar sweetened beverage consumption.”
Sip Smart! B.C. was first offered last school year at 220 schools and presented to 6000 students. It offered educators two sets of five 40-minute sessions delivered at two grade levels. Beginning next month information kits will be available for teachers to include in their regular health curriculum for the coming school year.
The program provides children with easy to understand facts about the food and drinks they consume - for example, a standard small can of soda contains 10 cubes worth of sugar, (1 cube is equivalent to 1 teaspoon) while a medium slushy has the equivalent of 24 sugar cubes.
Just imagine giving your child 24 teaspoons full of sugar - I don’t think most parents would do that, but then they willingly (but possibly unknowingly) let them drink a slushy or slurpie or whatever name those drinks go by at the local corner store.
Again, would you let your child sit and eat 10 teaspoons full of sugar - probably not - but when you let them have a can of soda that is what they are putting into their body.
Dr. Tom Warshawski, a local pediatrician and chairman of the non-profit Childhood Obesity Foundation said that “children should not have soft drinks at all.”
“In some ways,” Warshawski says, “soft drinks are more insidious than junk food such as potato chips because they don’t make you feel full and you end up consuming more.”
Studies show that 50% of Canadian adolescents drink soft drinks on a daily basis but there are no current studies showing how often or how many of the giant slushy’s are being consumed on a daily basis but hang around your local 7-11 and see the size of these containers that some of these kids are drinking and you might just end up like me, shaking your head and feeling like we are killing our kids slowly with sweetness.
