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Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

I love the strange looks we get when we tell extended family that our 1.5y old and 4y old kids don't drink juice. I had this exact conversation with a cousin of mine last week. She checked in with me before giving my child juice. When I told her we didn't give our kids juice this is how the conversation went:

Q: "They don't drink juice? What do they drink?"

A: "Water."

Q: "Just water?"

A: "Yep. If you want to get fancy they also drink soda water or water with lemon."

She looked judgy and baffled at how hard-ass my wife and I were about juice. But juice is straight calories in the form of sugar. There's no fibre to slow absorption like you'd get with eating the whole fruit. It's not much better, calorically speaking, than soda.

And in addition to being unhealthy, having young kids wired on sugar also makes our life harder.

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> wired on sugar

That's not a thing.

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/sugar-and-candy-...

(From one of the co-authors of this article)

Have kids and give them sugar. It absolutely is a verifiable thing. You get ~2-3 hours of hyperactivity/tunnelvision followed by the crying crash to nap combo. Every parent knows this. It's real and repeatable.

Hmm, this doesn't really verify it because the average person's kids might have been trained by now to react in a certain way after eating sugar. If you expect yourself to react a certain way after eating a food, you just might.

Similar to how a lot of kids are afraid of lightning because you are.

Confirmation bias, meet placebo control group.

From the article:

> In my favorite of these studies, children were divided into two groups. All of them were given a sugar-free beverage to drink. But half the parents were told that their child had just had a drink with sugar. Then, all of the parents were told to grade their children’s behavior. Not surprisingly, the parents of children who thought their children had drunk a ton of sugar rated their children as significantly more hyperactive. This myth is entirely in parents’ heads. We see it because we believe it.

I do have kids... I also know the differences between anecdotes and evidence.

Maybe it’s the environment in which I give my kids sugar that causes them to be wired.

But regardless, the crash is horrible to behold.

Confirmation bias at its finest.

To add, the "no sugar added" thing is wholly misleading because there are fruit concentrates that companies can add that are basically sugar substitutes. It's technically not "sugar added" but it's basically filled with healthy dollop of fructose (which is worse than sucrose but I'm too lazy to cite a reference).

Grape juice is the notorious one here. It doesn't have a very strong taste on its own, so when blended basically serves as a not-technically-added-sugar source of added sugar.

I recently saw a ginger-flavored carbonated that boasted of the percent juice. I was surprised by the number (30%?), and when I looked at the ingredients I saw that the juice was not mostly ginger. It was grape juice.

I understand that when I see “cranberry cocktail”, there’s a bunch of sweet juice mixed in. I didn’t realize that drinks of other flavors have so much clandestine grape juice — which is basically sugar.

I've also seen apple juice used as a sugar in "100% juice" drinks.

Yep, buy something like "kiwi-strawberry-guava" juice, apple or pear juice is usually the first ingredient. I wouldn't be surprised if most juices are flavored versions of the same base.

This depends on the country.

In France the wording 100% juice mans that that the liquid is directly from pressed fruit. No concentrates, nothing added. The only operation can be filtration and pasteurization.

Your last note about kids being wired on sugar, while pervasive and seemingly anecdotally supported, has not been proven out in the literature. Sugar has not been conclusively found to cause hyperactivity.

My son goes nuts when he has sugar (like ice cream or a cupcake), full stop.

Has it not been shown in the literature because no one has tried an appropriately rigorous experiment, or because the appropriately rigorous experiment showed a different conclusion?

It's actually the example that Aaron Carroll (one of the co-authors of the article) used to explain what an RCT is, and why it's one of the strongest study designs possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkr9YsmrPAI

I believe you, and I've seen what appears to be the same effect first-hand, but it has not been replicated in controlled environments. Here's a non-scientific article which cites several studies which failed to find a correlation: https://www.thecut.com/2016/08/the-sugar-high-is-actually-ju...

Ignoring the lunacy of wasting decades of training to prove (I hope, to everyone) the blindingly obvious, this would potentially be a real fun experiment to design.

What do you think is blindingly obvious?

Except they did design the experiment multiple times, and found the opposite of the "obvious" result.

My only difference is prune juice. Because my 2.5yo has only had other juices a couple of times, he thinks prune juice is a huge treat. I give him 2-3oz as a quick and easy source of fiber to promote regularity which is rrrreally helpful when potty training (side note: parenting is sooo dignified).

> It's not much better, calorically speaking, than soda.

It's a whole lot better nutritionally. Complete juice abstinence is silly unless your child seriously struggles with weight issues. A 6oz glass once in a while isn't going to give them diabetes.

I’d rather not give my kids a glass of juice OR soda but to each his/her own.

The whole point of the linked article is that juice is basically nutritionally equivalent to soda.

No, it says: "And we doubt you’d take a multivitamin if it contained 10 teaspoons of sugar." I'd sooner take that multivitamin than a pure sugar tablet. Soda has zero nutritional value.

What if you drank neither, though? There's a lot of talk in the past 10 or so years about how you're not really benefiting from vitamins either because you get enough vitamins in your diet.

Yeah, when our toddler is given juice, we dilute it with water for her. We’re trying to teach her that plain fruit juice is too sweet when drunk alone.

I typically drink carbonated water with just a little juice, for flavor.

I think the 'for flavor' is the problem, though. There's no reason that a drink needs to have a flavour; it's an acquired desire.

English NHS advice is very clear: don't give children juice, and if you do you must dilute it 1 part juice to 10 parts water.

And I bet your kids don't exhibit signs of ADD, people probably wonder what magical app you found that makes your kids well behaved while theirs drinks 2 gallons of juice a day and are climbing the walls

I believe the link between sugar and hyperactivity is mostly a myth

http://www.yalescientific.org/2010/09/mythbusters-does-sugar...

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