Sugar Overload: Do You Know How Much Sugar Your Kids Are REALLY Consuming?
Sugar and spice and everything nice. Isn’t that how the saying goes? We associate sugar with all that is good. We call people and actions sweet. We reward our children with sugary snacks when they do well. Who else remembers focusing on the lollipop prize for sitting still at the barber or being good at the doctor’s office? Sugar has been reinforced into our subconscious to mean good, well-deserved, and rewarding. We may even catch ourselves judging an anti-sweets person, trying to figure out what is wrong with them. For Americans, the use of sugar has become an extremely common and unhealthy habit.
Drinking in Movies and Teenage Drinking
Teenagers Who Watch Actors Drinking Alcohol in Movies More Likely to Drink Themselves A study published earlier this year in the journal Pediatrics found that young European teens who watched more scenes of actors drinking in Hollywood movies were more likely to binge-drink and otherwise abuse alcohol. Researchers gave questionnaires to more than 5,000 15-year-olds from England, and found that youths who had watched the most minutes of drinking scenes in different movies were twice as likely to have problems relating to alcohol as teens who had watched the fewest minutes. Those who had watched the most minutes were also almost 2.5 times more likely to drink at least once a week and 70 percent more likely to binge-drink (that is, drink 5 or more drinks in a single day).
Energy Drinks and Sports Drinks Linked to Unhealthy Behaviors in Teenagers
A new study has found that teenagers who regularly consume energy drinks and sports drinks are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors. Teens who often drank energy drinks like Red Bull and ROCKSTAR were more apt to smoke, use illicit drugs and drink alcohol. And teens who drank either energy or sports drinks regularly tended to spend more hours watching TV and playing video games. The study was published online recently in the Journal of Nutrition, Education and Behavior; it’s one of the first studies to show that consumption of these drinks may be part of an overall pattern of unhealthy behaviors for growing numbers of teenagers.
Caffeine, Energy Drinks and Children
With all the sugar and toxic chemicals in sodas, we should be pleased to know that children are drinking fewer caffeinated sodas these days. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that children, teens and young adults have decreased their caffeinated-soda consumption considerably: in 1999, 62 percent of kids to young adults named caffeinated sodas as their main source of caffeine. By 2010, that number had decreased to 38 percent. But there is bad news: youths are now consuming more energy drinks and coffee than they were in 1999, with coffee consumption more than doubling since then.