Minor rant

[conuly]

I don't generally buy the kids candy. Their parents don't keep it in the house, and mostly, a "special treat" consists of juice or a croissant. We've brainwashed these children into thinking that juice is a treat, yes.

Normally, people at least glance at the adult before offering kids food - especially treats, like candy. But somehow, nobody seems to think that "Welch's Fruit Snacks" count either as treats or food. "Oh, they've got vitamins in them!"

That's all I ever hear. People try passing that stuff off on the kids without even asking me first, and when I say "No, they can't have the candy" (which I don't like to do, it disappoints the kids when they think they've already got their hands on it), they go "Oh, they have vitamins in them!"

On a whim, I took a glance at the package the other day. The first ingredient is concentrated fruit juice. The next is high fructose corn syrup. I don't even know what the rest are, because I stopped reading - sugar and sugar, that's all I saw. I'm sure there's even more sugar in it, and some artificial colors.

Yes, it has "vitamins", but so does a piece of actual fruit - and that has far less sugar and is more filling. Unless, of course, you buy these candies in bulk like so many people seem to do. Eat enough of those, and I guess you'll fill your stomach.

I really try hard not to tell people to their faces that I think they feed their kids crap. It's a little rude. So I'd really appreciate it if people wouldn't try to justify their choices to me - saying "No, she can't have that" isn't judging you, and it isn't mean, and it isn't crazy, and if you don't argue with me, I won't *have* to tell you that I don't like feeding the kids straight sugar after every meal. Just ask first and then drop the subject when I say no. It's not that difficult.

Comments

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

The biggest problem with them is they stick to your teeth. Very hard to get off/out from between. A huge cause of tooth decay, really.

[conuly]

Raisins (over 50% sugar by weight, isn't that astonishing?) are just as bad for that, so they're also somewhat limited except in the case of oatmeal or whatnot.

But given a choice, I'd much rather they have some form of sticky dried fruit (like raisins) than welch's fruit snacks. Those things are ew-wy.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

RAISINS MAKE MY FLESH CRAWL.

I have an irrational hatred of them. I also dislike fruit snacks, taffy, starburst, skittles, etc.

Sadly the boys LOVE that stuff. We avoid it but they CRAVE it. (Might have to do with their oral issues but we have other ways of coping with that.)

Raisins look like little rabbit poos. :(

[strega42.livejournal.com]

I do not have cites for this on hand. It will take me a while to find them if you need them. However, HFCS is now suspected of causing insulin resistant diabetes.

I had one woman in a store try to offer my stepson some kind of granola bar something or other and I asked if she had the ingredient list. She said no, adn I asked if it had HFCS in it. She responded with "well, I'm sure it does!"

I told her no, thank you, but it causes diabetes, and he can't have it.

Her response?

Well, would you like to try it?

...No, lady. What part of I said "It causes diabetes did you not understand!"

"But it's a healthy energy bar full of fiber!" was her plaintive wail as I walked off.

I'd rather the kids had straight cane sugar in their treats. There's a few places left where you can get specialty sodas with cane sugar as the only sweetener.

Oddly enough, they're more satisfying, and they don't make you thirsty for more. Imagine that. *eyeroll*

Granted, the stepson is two years old. When he's here, he gets what sugar I personally put in his treats - lemonade, whipped cream, maple syrup on French toast - but it's real frakking sugar, and *I* get to control how much.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

There is a LOT more to diabetes than HFCS, and I can understand not wanting it but that really simplifies a serious disease. So telling people that you won't give HFCS because it causes diabetes will probably cause people to raise an eyebrow or two. (I have huge family history, I had GD, I have to monitor for it on a regular basis. I've seen dieticians over it.)
\
Jones soda is cane sugar, by the way. You can get it most everywhere! Or does it have some HFCS in it? I know it says CANE SUGAR right on the outside...

[strega42.livejournal.com]

There certainly as a lot more to diabetes than HFCS; I didn't mean to imply it was the ONLY cause for it. However, I was in a Walmart fighting off a really persistent idiot who had the candy bar masquerading as a granola bar halfway to the kid's face. :/

I'll try to find the cites about how HFCS affects blood sugar, because it's really, really scary.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Yeah HFCS is pretty scary stuff. And you should see the trains here (I am in Iowa) that pass by, tank after tank after tank after tank for MILES with the stuff).

And yeah people who are idiots in public when you have children with you NEED BEATINGS. Many of them. (And I'm a pacifist.)

[collectonian.livejournal.com]

Best place to find sodas made with cane sugar, besides places like World Market, is the Hispanic food aisle at your local grocery store! Seriously! I was just kinda looking at the sodas there in my store the other day because of the interesting flavors and almost all were made with real sugar. They even had some Coca Cola still made with sugar. In Mexico, the government has a 20% tax on HFCS drinks, so almost all drinks from there are made with real sugar! :)

[xmorningxrosex.livejournal.com]

i hate the idea that people would argue, even if they mean well. what if you didn't want to say, "well actually she's deathly allergic to xyz so NO, she really CANNOT have it" or explain that she only eats vegetarian/vegan/kosher/whatever, you shouldn't have to justify saying no or argue over something as silly as fruit snacks.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

You're right; these packaged juice-box things are crap - they don't have enough food-value to count as 'food', they don't taste good enough to count as 'treats', and they're full of questionable chemicals, not counting the sugar content. No argument there.

However - as an Early Childhood teacher and as the mother of an 18-year-old who chooses to eat real food and politely declines junk food - I'm here to tell you that you're going with the wrong strategy. One can't teach children not to want something by forbidding them to have it - indeed, that's the best way of making them want it - and the bigger they get, the harder it gets to keep 'the forbidden' away from them.

Of course you don't like feeding the kids straight sugar after every meal. No one's asking you to do that, though. Once in a while they get offered something that isn't really good for them, but that's also not going to kill them. So let them have it, if there's no non-disappointing alternative - with the disclaimer of "Well, we don't usually eat these" if you feel it necessary. Because your true goal is not just to see that the girls have good nutrition now, but to teach them to make intelligent nutritional choices throughout their lives.

Good judgement comes from experience, which in turn comes from poor judgement. You can't teach children how to think by telling them what to do - you've got to let them make their own mistakes. LOL, I remember the Halloween my daughter was 3, when she brought a whole plastic pumpkin's worth of treatsies home from her older Clan-sisters' school party. We told her that it was her candy, but eating too much of it would make her sick - then, instead of taking it away before that happened, we just let her eat as much as she wanted.

Sure enough, she turned green, and we were, like, "Hello, eating too much candy makes you sick." Same thing with the Xmas candy, the Easter candy (we spend holidays with my family, and kid+holiday=candy in their book) - nobody forbade her to stuff her wee face with treatsies on such occasions. But, y'know, kids who don't eat that stuff every day don't have much tolerance for it, and the point at which they're saying "Ugh, I don't feel good" is precisely the teaching-point, where they can make the connection between what they eat and how they feel. By Kindergarten, my kid had learned some moderation about candy.

Real fruit and fruit juice tastes great. The stuff in those nasty little boxes tastes like diluted cough medicine. Your clever little girlies have sense enough to figure that out for themselves, and also to figure out the difference between "you can't have that" and "I don't want you to have that". If they're not diabetic, they're not allergic, and their parents aren't Kosher or vegan or any such thing, it's not true that they *can't* have anything other children can have - of course they can have it; the real question is whether they think it's worth having.

[conuly]

It's not a packaged juice-box-thing. It's a bag of candy made of "real juice" which apparently makes it oh-so-healthy.

And honestly, I might very well have let them each have one except that, this time in particular, Ana had bought donuts out of her Very Own Money to share with her sister, and there's only so much hyper I'm willing to take in one day.

(And these people do bring in those same candies every single time I see them. Their kid eats at least three bags a day when I seem him, possibly more because I only see him for a few hours. But then, he shares them out, so maybe it's a little less...? At any rate, at this point, I'm getting really frustrated that nobody in the toddler groups (including this mother, naturally) seems to remember simple rules like "neither kid can have dairy" and "cheese is dairy" and "let's not overdose on the candy every day" and, despite the fact that they are incapable of remembering which child can't eat what (fair enough, they aren't relatives or close friends or whatnot) instead offers to the kid instead of checking with me first. The candy thing isn't as bad as the dairy thing, but that's what happened when I posted this entry, not random goldfish attacks (and yes, cheddar-flavored goldfish do contain dairy, imagine that!).

So this rant is really about "people need to ask first, because some of the stuff they're pushing will make me wish I were dead" with a side note of "and by the way, stop fooling yourselves, this crap ain't healthy, no matter what you say on the issue".

[leora.livejournal.com]

If someone replied back with, "But it has vitamins", I'd be tempted to say, "Then she definitely can't have it. We watch her vitamin intake to make sure she has all the vitamins she needs at a healthy level and many vitamins become toxic if you get too much."

Which is completely and utterly true. Of course, you're not likely to overdose on any vitamins from those things, but it should shut them up and make them think a little. Plus, it is somewhat true that if you're getting vitamin-fortified food, not just food that happens to have vitamins in it because the food naturally contains them, you could overdose on some of them. Especially because some vitamins are known to be more problematic in large doses if they are synthetic forms. I've been reading up a lot on vitamin D recently, and it's not actually the same getting it from vitamin-d rich foods and getting a vitamin form of it that people tried to make. And you can overdo vitamin d if it's synthetic.

It's not as bad as overdosing on iron, as far as I can tell, but still, if you're watching your health vitamin doesn't automatically mean good.

For that matter, nor does fiber. Fiber is good for you, but you don't want to have sudden changes in your fiber intake. You want to slowly increase your fiber if you're not getting enough.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

The biggest problem with them is they stick to your teeth. Very hard to get off/out from between. A huge cause of tooth decay, really.

[conuly]

Raisins (over 50% sugar by weight, isn't that astonishing?) are just as bad for that, so they're also somewhat limited except in the case of oatmeal or whatnot.

But given a choice, I'd much rather they have some form of sticky dried fruit (like raisins) than welch's fruit snacks. Those things are ew-wy.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

RAISINS MAKE MY FLESH CRAWL.

I have an irrational hatred of them. I also dislike fruit snacks, taffy, starburst, skittles, etc.

Sadly the boys LOVE that stuff. We avoid it but they CRAVE it. (Might have to do with their oral issues but we have other ways of coping with that.)

Raisins look like little rabbit poos. :(

[strega42.livejournal.com]

I do not have cites for this on hand. It will take me a while to find them if you need them. However, HFCS is now suspected of causing insulin resistant diabetes.

I had one woman in a store try to offer my stepson some kind of granola bar something or other and I asked if she had the ingredient list. She said no, adn I asked if it had HFCS in it. She responded with "well, I'm sure it does!"

I told her no, thank you, but it causes diabetes, and he can't have it.

Her response?

Well, would you like to try it?

...No, lady. What part of I said "It causes diabetes did you not understand!"

"But it's a healthy energy bar full of fiber!" was her plaintive wail as I walked off.

I'd rather the kids had straight cane sugar in their treats. There's a few places left where you can get specialty sodas with cane sugar as the only sweetener.

Oddly enough, they're more satisfying, and they don't make you thirsty for more. Imagine that. *eyeroll*

Granted, the stepson is two years old. When he's here, he gets what sugar I personally put in his treats - lemonade, whipped cream, maple syrup on French toast - but it's real frakking sugar, and *I* get to control how much.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

There is a LOT more to diabetes than HFCS, and I can understand not wanting it but that really simplifies a serious disease. So telling people that you won't give HFCS because it causes diabetes will probably cause people to raise an eyebrow or two. (I have huge family history, I had GD, I have to monitor for it on a regular basis. I've seen dieticians over it.)
\
Jones soda is cane sugar, by the way. You can get it most everywhere! Or does it have some HFCS in it? I know it says CANE SUGAR right on the outside...

[strega42.livejournal.com]

There certainly as a lot more to diabetes than HFCS; I didn't mean to imply it was the ONLY cause for it. However, I was in a Walmart fighting off a really persistent idiot who had the candy bar masquerading as a granola bar halfway to the kid's face. :/

I'll try to find the cites about how HFCS affects blood sugar, because it's really, really scary.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Yeah HFCS is pretty scary stuff. And you should see the trains here (I am in Iowa) that pass by, tank after tank after tank after tank for MILES with the stuff).

And yeah people who are idiots in public when you have children with you NEED BEATINGS. Many of them. (And I'm a pacifist.)

[(Anonymous)]

Best place to find sodas made with cane sugar, besides places like World Market, is the Hispanic food aisle at your local grocery store! Seriously! I was just kinda looking at the sodas there in my store the other day because of the interesting flavors and almost all were made with real sugar. They even had some Coca Cola still made with sugar. In Mexico, the government has a 20% tax on HFCS drinks, so almost all drinks from there are made with real sugar! :)

[xmorningxrosex.livejournal.com]

i hate the idea that people would argue, even if they mean well. what if you didn't want to say, "well actually she's deathly allergic to xyz so NO, she really CANNOT have it" or explain that she only eats vegetarian/vegan/kosher/whatever, you shouldn't have to justify saying no or argue over something as silly as fruit snacks.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

You're right; these packaged juice-box things are crap - they don't have enough food-value to count as 'food', they don't taste good enough to count as 'treats', and they're full of questionable chemicals, not counting the sugar content. No argument there.

However - as an Early Childhood teacher and as the mother of an 18-year-old who chooses to eat real food and politely declines junk food - I'm here to tell you that you're going with the wrong strategy. One can't teach children not to want something by forbidding them to have it - indeed, that's the best way of making them want it - and the bigger they get, the harder it gets to keep 'the forbidden' away from them.

Of course you don't like feeding the kids straight sugar after every meal. No one's asking you to do that, though. Once in a while they get offered something that isn't really good for them, but that's also not going to kill them. So let them have it, if there's no non-disappointing alternative - with the disclaimer of "Well, we don't usually eat these" if you feel it necessary. Because your true goal is not just to see that the girls have good nutrition now, but to teach them to make intelligent nutritional choices throughout their lives.

Good judgement comes from experience, which in turn comes from poor judgement. You can't teach children how to think by telling them what to do - you've got to let them make their own mistakes. LOL, I remember the Halloween my daughter was 3, when she brought a whole plastic pumpkin's worth of treatsies home from her older Clan-sisters' school party. We told her that it was her candy, but eating too much of it would make her sick - then, instead of taking it away before that happened, we just let her eat as much as she wanted.

Sure enough, she turned green, and we were, like, "Hello, eating too much candy makes you sick." Same thing with the Xmas candy, the Easter candy (we spend holidays with my family, and kid+holiday=candy in their book) - nobody forbade her to stuff her wee face with treatsies on such occasions. But, y'know, kids who don't eat that stuff every day don't have much tolerance for it, and the point at which they're saying "Ugh, I don't feel good" is precisely the teaching-point, where they can make the connection between what they eat and how they feel. By Kindergarten, my kid had learned some moderation about candy.

Real fruit and fruit juice tastes great. The stuff in those nasty little boxes tastes like diluted cough medicine. Your clever little girlies have sense enough to figure that out for themselves, and also to figure out the difference between "you can't have that" and "I don't want you to have that". If they're not diabetic, they're not allergic, and their parents aren't Kosher or vegan or any such thing, it's not true that they *can't* have anything other children can have - of course they can have it; the real question is whether they think it's worth having.

[conuly]

It's not a packaged juice-box-thing. It's a bag of candy made of "real juice" which apparently makes it oh-so-healthy.

And honestly, I might very well have let them each have one except that, this time in particular, Ana had bought donuts out of her Very Own Money to share with her sister, and there's only so much hyper I'm willing to take in one day.

(And these people do bring in those same candies every single time I see them. Their kid eats at least three bags a day when I seem him, possibly more because I only see him for a few hours. But then, he shares them out, so maybe it's a little less...? At any rate, at this point, I'm getting really frustrated that nobody in the toddler groups (including this mother, naturally) seems to remember simple rules like "neither kid can have dairy" and "cheese is dairy" and "let's not overdose on the candy every day" and, despite the fact that they are incapable of remembering which child can't eat what (fair enough, they aren't relatives or close friends or whatnot) instead offers to the kid instead of checking with me first. The candy thing isn't as bad as the dairy thing, but that's what happened when I posted this entry, not random goldfish attacks (and yes, cheddar-flavored goldfish do contain dairy, imagine that!).

So this rant is really about "people need to ask first, because some of the stuff they're pushing will make me wish I were dead" with a side note of "and by the way, stop fooling yourselves, this crap ain't healthy, no matter what you say on the issue".

[leora.livejournal.com]

If someone replied back with, "But it has vitamins", I'd be tempted to say, "Then she definitely can't have it. We watch her vitamin intake to make sure she has all the vitamins she needs at a healthy level and many vitamins become toxic if you get too much."

Which is completely and utterly true. Of course, you're not likely to overdose on any vitamins from those things, but it should shut them up and make them think a little. Plus, it is somewhat true that if you're getting vitamin-fortified food, not just food that happens to have vitamins in it because the food naturally contains them, you could overdose on some of them. Especially because some vitamins are known to be more problematic in large doses if they are synthetic forms. I've been reading up a lot on vitamin D recently, and it's not actually the same getting it from vitamin-d rich foods and getting a vitamin form of it that people tried to make. And you can overdo vitamin d if it's synthetic.

It's not as bad as overdosing on iron, as far as I can tell, but still, if you're watching your health vitamin doesn't automatically mean good.

For that matter, nor does fiber. Fiber is good for you, but you don't want to have sudden changes in your fiber intake. You want to slowly increase your fiber if you're not getting enough.