Tips on Having a Low Sugar, Healthy Holiday Season for Your Kids

Sugar Might Make the Holidays Sweeter, but it Can Have Harmful Effects on Your Child

The holiday parties, Christmas sugar cookies, candy canes and stockings stuffed to the brim with sugary goodness: the holidays are certainly a tempting time for parents who wish to limit sugar during the rest of the year. It's hard enough to keep ourselves from giving into excessive treats and Peppermint Latte's, not to mention going against the grain by depriving our children from such delights. And who wants to spoil all the fun anyway, right?

Christmastime might be your favorite holiday, but the sugar industry is pretty fond of it as well. The sugar industry pulls in more money during the holidays than at any other time during the year - a profit some would say puts our children at dangerous risks.

The World Health Organization has urged for a less than 10% caloric intake of sugar - the average child consumes at least twice this daily. This doesn't mean simply passing on Little Debbie's snacks in the afternoon will suffice: read the labels of all the food you give your child during the day. Baked beans, cereal, hot dogs, juice - just about everything has added sugars in it, in the form of corn syrup, sucrose, dextrose or the many other names sugar falls under. Every year food manufacturers increase the amount of sugar in their recipes, sneaking it into foods that we do not consider "sweets". It is in these foods that we reach the 10% recommendation; the rest is excess. Even the alternatives that many parents think are harmless, such as a granola bar or fruit snacks, are sugar in disguise. They say they are low in fat and made with whole grain, how bad can it be? News flash: high fructose corn syrup making the top five ingredients is not exactly a healthy snack.

What's so harmful? The American diet of high sugar foods has been linked in studies to childhood obesity, tooth decay and diabetes. It's startling to hear reports that Type-2 diabetes has tripled in young children in the past decade. Many studies have also linked sugar intake to hyperactivity in children, causing some schools to ban soft drinks and other similar actions.