Just like the rest of us, kids need to eat a variety of foods to lead healthy lives.
However, the way father and Reddit user BigDaddyCoolDeiselimagines his children’s diet is very, very different from that of the family‘s older members.
In a post on r/BoomersBeingFools, he vented his frustration over relatives who can’t accept that his kids prefer water and fruit to soda and sweets and take it upon themselves to ‘fix’ this abnormality with unsolicited junk food.
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Image credits: freepik (not the actual image)
And for this man, most of it comes from relatives who disapprove of his kids’ eating habits
Image credits: Jeswin Thomas (not the actual image)
Image credits: BigDaddyCoolDeisel
Sugar consumption is a huge problem
A growing body of research is on the dad’s side. For example, a recent study in the journal Science shows that high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes are more common in adults who were exposed to increased added sugars early in life.
“If you were exposed to sweet foods early in life, it’s likely that you’re going to prefer them throughout your life more than someone who was not,” says Tadeja Gracner, a scientist at the University of Southern California, who coauthored the research.
Sugar naturally occurs in some foods like fruit, but it’s also often added during processing or preparation. Children in the U.S. certainly eat plenty of added sugar, consuming an average of 17 teaspoons of it a day, which equates to roughly 300 calories.
This is well above the 10 percent of calories in added sugars recommended by dietary officials for children over age two, and far from the ideal of less than five percent of total calories the World Health Organization suggests.
(Ten percent would translate to roughly 100 to 200 calories, depending on the age of the child.)
Children under two should eat no added sugar whatsoever.
Reducing children’s sugar consumption is a key priority in the U.S. government’s Healthy People 2030 goals, but cutting the figures is challenging in a society where sugar is abundant not just in the candy aisle but in relatives’ cupboards as well.
People have had a lot of reactions to the story and have shared their own similar experiences, too
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