In today’s lesson of nutrition with Auntie:

This morning my niece was excited to tell me about these new electrolyte drinks. She said “auntie, you can have these! They don’t have any sugar or carbs.” I told her while they may advertise that there is no sugar that might not be actually the case. I shared that sugar is also hidden in the ingredient list being labelled as sucralose, fructose, glucose, corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, etc. Sure enough the drink contains sucralose. I explained that where you find that ingredient in the list is how high that content is and if it’s one of the first few ingredients listed, it’s a definite no to avoid. While on the topic of reading ingredient labels, I told her that any item that she can’t pronounce or doesn’t know she shouldn’t be consuming. She quickly went to the cupboard of snacks looking up the sugar content and reading the ingredients. She couldn’t believe it. We then moved on to juice boxes. We played a game of “guess how much sugar this juice box has.” We came to one that she thought for sure would be the best juice box out of all of them and I asked why. I asked if it was because the juice box advertises that it’s a source of vitamin C right on the front. It turns out that juice box was not only the smallest size but also contained the most sugar coming in at whopping 10g of sugar more than the others.

Today she decided against grabbing extra “snacks” and skipped the juice box too.

My hope is that she shares this information with her friends and carries it forward in her life. These little teaching moments can have a profound effect and make a difference!