My grandmother and I were talking about sugar yesterday, and she said that she used to make dessert for her skinny, skinny family every day. I make dessert about twice a week, I said, which caused my oldest child, Miss Snortypants, to guffaw.
"Twice a week?" she said. "Nuh-uh. More like twice a MONTH. Or TWICE A YEAR."
The poor little thing. Her mother never makes dessert. Or what SHE considers a dessert: chocolate cake with lavish fudge frosting, chocolate brownie cobbler with chocolate sauce, slabs of homemade brownies studded with white chocolate chunks… Those are somewhat rare, occurring once a month or so, while we do have frequent servings of less thrilling desserts – fruit crisps, oatmeal cookies, and lots of sometimes-successful gluten free experiments.
I was sitting beside another mother a few months ago while our sons were attending swimming lessons, and chatting casually with her while adding a few things to my week’s menu plan. She was reading it over my shoulder and pulled a face when she saw how many desserts where on the list.
"That’s a whole lot of sugar!" she said. And then her kid waddled out of the pool and she gave him a can of pop. I AM NOT KIDDING.
One can of pop has a quarter of a cup of sugar. If your kid drinks two cans of pop a day, your child is drinking HALF A CUP OF SUGAR A DAY. That is CRAZY. Add in fruit juice – which I think is nutritionally a terrible idea – sweetened fruit drinks, freshy (or "fleshy", as The Baby called it this weekend), sweetened iced tea, and you have a ridiculous amount of sugar and empty calories being consumed by most children every single day. (and their mothers – a very popular Canadian coffee chain’s Iced Cappuccino has 17 TEASPOONS of sugar in it and 700 calories. Gah.) Add to that the sugary boxed cereals, prepackaged lunchbox snacks, canned soups, granola bars and all of the rest of the average Canadian child’s diet, and you have a nation of kids who are swimming in cheap, over-processed sugar.
So instead of all of that, my kids get bowls of oatmeal or homemade granola or fruit smoothies, homemade cookies in their lunchboxes, and the occasional homemade dessert (more frequently than ONCE A MONTH, twerpy Daughter!). It takes a bit of planning and a bit of effort – but neither as much effort or planning as you might think – tonight, I’m experimenting with making rice pudding in our rice cooker, which is an idea that occurred to me over the weekend – we’ll see how it goes, although I’ve had so much luck with adding in ingredients in the rice cooker that I’m pretty confident that it will be tasty.
Sugar is not the enemy. The enemy is our unthinking overconsumption of sugar and the way that we’ve all cheerfully accepted these shelves full of nutritionally terrible foods as part of our everyday diet. No matter how well I think we might be doing, however, my children’s quiet griping suggests that all is not well at my house, that they feel shortchanged. (which seems ridiculous to me, but there you have it.) How do you balance your children’s desires for the foods that they see advertised and see their friends’ eating with their need for a healthy diet?
good..
wow
good work
I am so glad that the LG isn’t in the seeitontv/wantitNOW boat yet. Phew! Cutting down on sugar consumption can be really difficult but we do give ourselves a pat on the back for how often we make our meals from scratch.
It did my heart good to read the word ‘freshy’ in your post. Grama used to always call it that and I was reminiscing about that last week. Mr. J. thinks the word ‘freshy’ is just plain silly. harumph!
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“Sugar is not the enemy.”
SO TRUE! Balance is the key, as it is to almost everything in life.
My kids know they have to eat all their dinner (or lunch) if they want a treat. If they don’t want to eat all their food, they are free to go. But no sugar.
for me it’s about balance. i don’t deprive my kids of sugar, but i also don’t pump them full of pop and juice.
and i cook and bake with splenda a lot.
(also…i use splenda in my coffee at starbucks. cuts a TON of those calories.)
I felt deprived of desserts as a kid, but now that I’m grown up, I’m glad that daily dinner treats are nto a habit I got into.
For Munchkin? Sometimes as an after-school snack she’ll have a little package of those 100-calorie ‘oreos’ or ‘honey maid’ cookies. It’s portion controlled, and sugar-reduced. There is no pop here. No branded ‘fruit’ snacks or processed treats. We even get the sugar-reduced jam. We don’t buy juice (Pynchon whines about this; he just does not believe me that it is completely nutritionally void). We eat healthy at home, but when we’re at Gramma’s or at a friend’s house and they want to give her something special, I let it go: I don’t want her to get neurotic about it.
Our sugar shock day is family brunch at the local greasy spoon: she eats a whole pancake, with syrup, and gets half a glass of apple juice, cut with water.
AMEN!
Anja is not yet a year (but almost), so she pretty much eats what I feed her. Well, eats it or plays with it. I have found she already has her mama’s penchant for sweets. But same as you, we stay away from sodas and juices and any processed or prepackaged foods. The occasional crackers make their way into our cupboards, and we do eat cereal as a snack (in place of a sugary dessert) on occasion, which may change once she’s old enough to see us eating them. 🙂
My kids don’t have fruit juice, soda or kool-aid. Water or milk, that’s it. A sandwich and a piece of fruit for lunch, and – whatever for dinner. But breakfast is BAD. We ALWAYS eat sugary cereal. I need to cut it out. It’s just so dang EASY.
GAWD! Pop for kids is taboo in my home. So is juice, most days. But I almost NEVER make dessert. Honestly. However, I will admit to having some packaged treats. We buy lower sugar granola bars which they eat maybe 3-4 times per week. I HATE those “fruit treats” which are nothing but gummy candy. If I buy them they are a once-per-week treat. I will occasionally make (or buy…as a working mom I simply cannot make everything my family eats from scratch) rice krispie squares as a treat, too.
I agree…sugar is ubiquitous. However I’m lucky in that my kids are just as happy to have a bowl of berries as a popsicle (usually!).
I am one of those skinny skinny kids that your grandma used to make desserts for everyday. I can still taste everything! We would come home from school and whatever she had for lunch dessert would be our after school snack. And the cookie jar was never empty!! Those were the days. However, even though desserts are much fewer for me now and less sugar is a good idea, I think we should also remember one word – consumption. One of the problems today is that kids (and adults too!)are just not consuming what they eat. So don’t forget about exercise – lots of it!!
Like Veronica, we have a tv-free home, and that does help tremendously.
I try to be pretty strict at home since it’s so difficult to control what they get in other contexts (like, for instance, Gramma’s house, where we are right now, and where they have eaten fruit snacks and pop-tarts and sugary cereal EVERY DAY).
So, at home, we don’t have:
–fruit juice
–soda
–anything with high-fructose corn syrup
We actually are keeping candy on hand lately, for use as a Colin Went Poop On The Potty Award, but it’s limited to that (I turn a blind eye to anything that disappears into my hubs’ office in the basement). And their expectations are about right so far. They know that at home they don’t get the stuff they get here.
Thankfully, my little guys LOVE whole fruit, which I don’t mind them eating because the nutrition balances out the sugar.
I can’t get over the woman reading your grocery list and having the audacity to comment. I bet she is one of those cart-snoopers at the grocery store, too.
We have dessert a few times a week. Usually it is something simple like a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Occasionally, I’ll bake a cake for the heck of it. I like doing seasonal desserts, like strawberry shortcakes, peach cobbler, apple crisp, etc.
I think I am with your daughter in theory. Desserts should be indulgent and grand. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way in real life.
and corn. corn is in everything.
EVERYTHING.
Did the mother slap herself in the head afterward? We do try to stay away from too much sugar and processed food here. And, of course, artificial sweetener. This morning I made really yummy oatmeal with just a bit of sugar (I usually use brown, but I am out) and a mushed up banana. I was hoping my baby wouldn’t eat it all so I could have the rest. He ate it ALL, though.
I heard a piece on the radio the other day about donuts. Apparently a lot fo people refuse to eat donuts because of the sugar and instead opt for frappucinos, which have more sugar.
The best thing about not having a tv is that my kids have almost zero exposure to most ads, so there isn’t much that they want just because they saw a picture of it. But because they are so skinny, our doctor suggested giving them chocolate milk, just to encourage them to drink it. We try to restrict that to mornings only.
For the other sugary things – our girls really don’t like juice or lemonade, and our household rule about pop is that they cannot drink it at all until they are old enough to brush their own teeth.
Beck, you were once kind enough to leave a comment on my blog when I was angst-ing about this very issue, so I will just say, I could have written this post! We have the same “quiet [and not-quiet] griping” and longing for other people’s food at my house, and they’re hardly deprived — even if I don’t feed them sugar (and I use alternatives when baking) — it seems we can hardly go anywhere without them being given lollipops, birthday cake, the like, on what seems a daily basis.
I like one of the previous poster’s ideas of taping up the food pyramid for them to see …
My kids eat “treats” and sometimes I feel like those are too frequent, but I don’t want to completely limit it either, since I feel like then they’d want it more. I make homemade dessert a couple of times a month. They get candy from time to time, especially at birthday parties or during holidays. We buy sugar-sweetened cereal. A balanced diet is something I definitely strive for and moderately achieve. We definitely have tons of room for progress though, so I’m always trying to do better.
I don’t balance things as well as I should, however, getting home from work and having the kids bawling insanely from hunger they are rather happy to be gobbling a bowl of brocolli and cauliflower. Maybe I’m not doing too badly after all.
My boys are constantly asking for the Batman cereal or the Nemo “fruit” snacks when we go to the store. I very simply tell them that those are not healthy for them and they accept it.
Luckily for me the boys eat fruit like it is a snack. Especially in summer.
When all he wants is sugar, I just quit buying stuff with sugar. I don’t mind the occasional fruit snacks, but not every day etc. And we do make homemade cookies and stuff like that where I don’t care if he has them.
And we try not to buy pop at all. I’m pretty sure the schools around here have outlawed pop.
I’m sure we still overconsume sugar though.
I don’t have much to say about kids and sugar. (Aren’t Twinkies part of the joy of having a child’s metabolism?) However, one thing that used to annoy me when I waited tables is when moms would order Diet Coke for children under the age of 10. I get not wanting them to have too much sugar (or the kids could have been diabetic) but why not give them milk instead of something so horribly artificial in their new little bodies?
WOW! I am in awe that woman did not see the sugar drink as a problem!
My kids do not get pop. I would prefer it not in the house at all but alas since I cannot control EVERYTHING my husband sometimes gets his own way. hrrumpphhh.
I try to make everything homemade now. I am learning. I am trying. We will get there!
Ah yes. Years ago when we had to go on the Candida diet we learned how much sugar was in EVERYTHING. Which is why now that we eat a more “normal” diet my kids get homemade bread and granola and seldom get soda pop and never get dessert (nope, they eat dessert foods for breakfast only–like today when they ate the pie we made last night. :))
I so want the recipe for the rice pudding. That is, if you’re actually successful. If it’s too gloppy, feed it to your sugar-deprived children.
Home made treats here only. Not only for nutrition, but cost.
And speaking of cost, assuming the coffee chain you refer to rhymes with Kim Bortons, I’m glad I’m too cheap to indulge in that particular treat more than once or twice a summer.
Our problem isn’t sugar so much as salt. We splurged this weekend and went out for ice cream, BubTar didn’t even want 3 licks of his cone. But chips and that sort of salty fare? He would live on it if we’d let him.
Since both my girls are famously picky eaters I follow the rule that the healthy stuff must be eaten first before any kind of treat is consumed. This often leads to no treats at all which is fine by me. Show your kids the food pyramid and explain it to them, I did and it works. Both my girls clearly understand what is proper food and what is a treat and I figure if they wanted that treat bad enough they would eat the healthy stuff.
It doesn’t mean they never get treats. My eldest will get granola bars in her lunch once or twice a week. They get treats when we are out all the time. I just find that if I control it at home, then it will all balance out a bit better.
Since both my girls are famously picky eaters I follow the rule that the healthy stuff must be eaten first before any kind of treat is consumed. This often leads to no treats at all which is fine by me. Show your kids the food pyramid and explain it to them, I did and it works. Both my girls clearly understand what is proper food and what is a treat and I figure if they wanted that treat bad enough they would eat the healthy stuff.
It doesn’t mean they never get treats. My eldest will get granola bars in her lunch once or twice a week. They get treats when we are out all the time. I just find that if I control it at home, then it will all balance out a bit better.