Are juices a good drink for kids?

Posted by kathryn in A Balanced Diet, Fruit and Kid's nutrition

As I’ve blogged about , juices are not necessarily all they’re cracked up to be. Yes, they contain vitamins and antioxidants, but that’s mixed up with a whole lot of kilojoules and no fibre. 1 glass of orange juice (ie 250ml) is more than 500 kilojoules, which is equal to :

• 2 bananas
• 3 small apples
• 3 punnets of fresh strawberries
• 3 oranges
• 2 tablespoons of sultanas

So, if you’re drinking a few glasses of juice a day, then you’re notching up a lot of kilojoules.

Many parents give juice to kids as their primary source of fluids. It’s sweet, most kids like it and there’s the assumption that juice is healthy. However, again, it’s a lot of kilojoules.

If a child is drinking only juice during the day, then this really adds to their energy intake – four glasses of juice would equal over 2,000 kilojoules, that’s the same as six chicken Mcnuggets and a small fries . Or for a moderately active three year old, 2,000 kilojoules is one-fifth of their recommended daily kilojoule intake .

If you can, get your kids to eat fruit

• put tinned fruit on their cereal
• make a fruit salad with yoghurt for dessert
• use as an after school snack
• make some of my low fat, low sugar fruit muffins (eg peach, walnut and ginger muffins or pear, maple and walnut muffins )
• cook baked apples for dessert
• use dried fruit as a snack
• make grated apple, sultana and low fat cream cheese sandwiches

Buy the fruit your kids like and if they are hungry they’ll eat it. If your kids won’t drink anything other than juice, then start diluting it, gradually making it weaker and weaker until it’s mostly water.

For more ideas on eating fruit, click here .

Technorati tags: juice , soft drinks

30 March, 2007