Rebellion is most certainly part of a teenager’s job description. Its part of our kid’s journey to become independent adults. As a parent of two teens and a twenty year old, I’ve endured my share of this energy over the years.

An anguished parent of a teenager reached out to me today. Her teen-aged son has a job working at a food store and is eating huge amounts of junk food as a result. This mom wanted some help in finding a way to get her kid to see the light about chemicalized processed packaged food. After all, at home she cooks great food from scratch using real ingredients.

The toxic food environment is everywhere, and the older our kids get, the more they are immersed in it. At a certain point, all we can do is cook really good food, don’t preach (too much) and hope that at some point our kids realize that our food values are worthwhile.

But if you want to do a little  gentle preaching with your teen, here are some ideas on how to go about it.

ZITS: Connect the dots between clear skin and clean food. Mark Hyman’s recent piece about Ance and Sugar is worth a read. Perhaps a 21-day elimination diet that includes lots of fresh water (and no Gatorade or diet soda) will show some results that will keep your teen eating clean.

MANIPULATIVE MARKETING: Teenagers hate being taken advantage of. Once they learn more  about the $4.2 BILLION dollars spent to lure them to eat junk food,  they might re-think their choices.

ADD/ADHD: If your teen has a hard time staying focused, junk food may be the culprit. Recent research in the Lancet medical journal suggests that ADHD can be induced by food. In the new study, kids with ADHD were put on a “restricted elimination diet” containing only rice, meat, vegetables, pears and water for five weeks. The authors found that ADHD symptoms were reduced in 78 per cent of children placed on the diet.  5 weeks of clean food may result in your teen getting more homework done in less time. It is well worth looking into.

My Junk Food E-book

My E-book, Winning the Junk Food War will give you further support and inspiration to fight the good fight with your tweens and teens. You can learn more about it by clicking here.

But  always remember, at the end of the day, your best bet is to invest in a good meal made at home from excellent ingredients. Our walk is more powerful than our talk!

Don't kid yourself! Twinkies are not a weight loss panacea!

I’ve received numerous emails and Facebook requests about the big news: a nutrition professor at  Kansas State University has allegedly lost close to 30 pounds by eating a low calorie diet that includes significant amounts of Twinkies for 8 weeks. The media circus is spinning with this news, if you haven’t already heard about it, you will very soon.

Professor Haub, along with the American Dietetic Association, cite this as proof positive that calories count.  The food industry loves nothing more than promoting the mythology that calories matter above all else. Here in America, we are over focused on calories, fat and carbs. And we’re fatter than ever.

We have a billion dollar diet industry that thrives on American’s gullibility and lack of common sense when it comes to food. 80-90% of all weight lost through dieting is regained. Weight Watchers is a great example of this phenomenon. People tell me Weight Watchers is great, they’ve gone 5 or 6 times over the years, losing the same 5-20 pounds over and over again.

As nutritional anthropologist Liz Snyder reminded me, Jenny Craig is owned by Nestle, Wt Watchers by the same co. that owns Keebler foods. Your yo-yo diet is their ponzi scheme!

Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  Calorie counting is one of those insane things. Not to mention it takes all the fun out of eating food.

Back to the Twinkie guy. Here’s the deal. He’s been eating Twinkies  (and a protein shake and a multivitamin) every day for 8 weeks. His weight is down, for now.  His cholesterol has slightly improved,  which could be a result of his drinking whole milk. After all, saturated fat has been shown to improve HDL levels.

Bottom line? The real story will be 6 months to a year from now. Will the weight stay off?  Will he end up with a “unrelated” health issue? Will the news media follow that story or will we all be onto the next “big news”? Our collective attention span is too short to follow this story to the real conclusion.

To call it now and say this guy actually lost the 26 pounds is like calling a baseball game after 2 innings. The game isn’t over yet.

Before any of you go running to the store to get your share of Twinkies, you might want to take a look at this book: Trinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger. At least then, you’ll know what you’re eating.

Whack-a-mole

I do enjoy playing Whac-a-Mole when I bring my kids to the arcade. For those of you who don’t get out that much to participate in this sort of amusement, the Whac-A-Mole machine consists of a large, waist-level cabinet with five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole. Once the game starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, thereby adding to the player’s score. The more quickly this is done the higher the final score will be. As the game goes, on the pace gets faster, sometimes with 2 moles at a time rearing up out of the holes. You’ve got to be fast and hit hard to beat the moles and win the game. Its good exercise and builds hand eye coordination.

As  a parent who is trying to feed their kids the right stuff, I feel we are playing Whac-A-Mole every day with the food industry.  Let me explain my metaphor and see if you agree.

Way back when I was growing up, it was somehow determined that fat made you fat. The food industry responded with loads of “low fat”  and even “fat free” food products. Everyone rushed out to get them. And everyone continued to get fatter, and sicker. Next came the no carb craze and just about over night, everything, even bread, became “low carb” And everyone continued to gain weight and lose their health.

These days, the moles that pop up in the food industry’s Whac-A-Mole game are things like trans fats. We pounded that one down with our mallets, but the food industry responded with palm oil and cottonseed oil: two ingredients that are hurt our health and the health of the planet (as I’ve written about in previous posts) . HFCS was the next bad boy ingredient that popped up in the Whack-A-Mole game, the food industry is responding by renaming high fructose corn syrup into corn sugar and replacing HFCS in some drinks with real sugar. Will that sneaky mole get by us, or will we pound it back into its hole with our mallets?

There is way to win this game. You see, the food industry wins every game as long as we keep putting our money into their system. Bang all the moles you want, but the machine gets your quarter no matter how high the score. What we all need to do is walk away from the Whac-A-Mole game that the food industry has set up.

Invest your money elsewhere in real food that you can believe in. Food that is grown closer to home, food that doesn’t have ingredients you can’t pronounce, food that doesn’t have a fancy marketing budget.  Don’t play their game anymore.

Watch this Whac-A-Mole action and see if you feel the same way when buying standard American food in the supermarket. There really is a better way to eat and to live besides being forced to play continual game of Whac-A-Mole…..

Mayonaise homemade from real eggs

When putting together my purslane potato salad last night, I ran out of mayo. Hubby offered to zip out to the store and pick up a bottle, but to use store bought mayonnaise would have canceled out the nutritional benefit of the omega 3 containing purslane!

Let me explain.  Mayonnaise is a stable emulsion of oil, egg yolk and either vinegar or lemon juice. Most brands of store bought mayonnaise use soybean oil and who knows where the heck their eggs are coming from.  These two ingredients are ones you don’t want to skimp on.  Most soybean oil in the US is genetically modified, not to mention soybean oil is high in pro-inflammatory Omega 6. My gut tells me that the company that makes Hellman’s mayonnaise is not going to go out of their way to get really high quality eggs for their mayo.

More expensive brands of mayonnaise found at the health food store, such as Spectrum are a little bit better, but most of them also contain organic soybean oil, which is an improvement but still not ideal. I’m also not a huge fan of canola oil . Despite the hype that canola oil is high in Omega 3 fats, the highly processed nature of this oil is questionable. The procedure involves a combination of high-temperature mechanical pressing and solvent extract, usually using hexane. Even after considerable refining, traces of the solvent remain. Like most vegetable oils, Canola oil also goes through the process of bleaching, degumming, deodorizing, and caustic refining, at very high temperatures. This process can alter the omega-3 content in the oil, and in certain conditions bring the trans fat level as high as 40 percent. Some brands such as Spectrum offer an expeller pressed canola oil, but once again, you’re going to want to take it a step further and look for Organic 100% expeller pressed canola oil to be sure you’re not ingesting genetically modified canola.

Sounds like a wild goose chase, huh? So this is how I came to the conclusion that I’d be better off making my own darn mayonnaise!  With a Kitchen aid mixer, the process is not all that complicated. This way I know exactly what ingredients are going in my mayo. Eggs I trust from a local farmer, organic olive oil from a good source and fresh squeezed lemon juice, what could be easier?

Lately, I’ve been buying eggs at my local farmer’s market from Feather Ridge Farm. Its worth the extra pennies to invest in eggs that come from happy chickens who are not fed antibiotics and hormones. These eggs are high in Omega 3 because the chickens were fed flaxseed and alfalfa.  You can tell the difference when you crack the egg: supermarket eggs have thinner shells and paler yolks.

Here’s my mayo recipe, try it out! Its easier than you think!

Ingredients:

• 2 egg yolks
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon powdered mustard
• 1/8 teaspoon sugar
• Pinch cayenne pepper
• 4 to 5 teaspoons lemon juice or white vinegar
• 1-1/2 cups olive oil
• 4 teaspoons hot water

Procedure:

1. Beat yolks,salt, mustard, sugar, pepper  and 1 teaspoon lemon juice  until very thick and pale yellow. (Note: I used the wire whisk attachment on my KItchen Aid electric mixer at medium speed.)

2. Add about 1/4 cup oil drop by drop, beating vigorously all the while. Beat in 1 teaspoon each lemon juice and hot water. Add another 1/4 cup oil a few drops at a time, beating vigorously all the while. Beat in another teaspoon each lemon juice and water. Add 1/2 cup oil in a very fine steady stream, beating constantly, then mix in remaining lemon juice and water; slowly beat in remaining oil.  Cover and refrigerate until needed. Do not keep longer than 1 week.

Note: Making mayonnaise results in leftover egg whites. This can only mean one thing: time to make meringue cookies! Stay tuned for the recipe.

Growing your own is easier than you think!

Yesterdays news reported that tainted lettuce has sickened at least 19 people in Ohio, New York and Michigan, including students on three college campuses, prompting a recall throughout much of the country.

The romaine lettuce is sold under the Freshway and Imperial Sysco brands in Alabama, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

This is just another grim reminder that our industrialized food system is broken. When it comes to food, bigger is not better. This “big lettuce” was being shipped to 24 states! Think of all the gas those trucks burned and spewed into the atmosphere to send all that lettuce to your local super market or school cafeteria.  How did this lettuce become tainted with E.coli? Most likely via contaminated water supply. How did the water supply become contaminated? It could be due to a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) nearby containing excess animal waste that leaked into underground aquifers. It sounds like The Cat in the Hat Comes Back to me!

What can you do to make sure your lettuce is safe? It’s easy. Grow your own! Lettuce is one of the easiest plants to grow. You can get creative with the container if you like. All it takes is some seeds, sunlight, some good (clean) water and 21-28 days.  You’ll save money too, a packet of seeds will get you loads and loads of lettuce. Your kids will eat more salad too, if they are in charge of planting, watering and harvesting.

Warning! Lettuce may become a “gateway drug” for other vegetables! Once you realize how easy it is to grow your own, you’ll be searching the seed catalogs for more adventures!

Yesterday, I wrote about the ambiguous nature of one word: sugar.  The food industry and well meaning mainstream nutritionists have succeeded in confusing us. Is sugar good? Is it bad? I spend loads of time helping clients understand the  distinctions between the sugar found in carrots and how that is completely different from the crystalline fructose (a fancy word for corn syrup) found in Vitamin Water.

There are so many words on food labels and in advertising that are, quite frankly, completely dangerous.  We read them and fall into a consensus trance, believing that these products are actually good for us.  When working with middle school students, I often encourage them to go on a “health claim hunt” in their kitchen cabinets at home.  They bring back some pretty outrageous marketing gimmicks. Here’s a few:

• Contains antioxidants
• Eco-friendly
• Green
• Made with whole grains
• May lower cholesterol
• Natural
• No trans fat
• Fat free
• Strengthens your immune system

“The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.”

- Joseph Goebbels

It may be a bit upsetting to see me quoting a Nazi about lies, but in most cases when you see a health claim, its because the product has some dirty secrets.  Let me show you a few examples.

Eco friendly water bottles that use 30% less plastic than other bottles are still plastic bottles that leach questionable chemicals into your drink. Not to mention that the source of that water might not be as pristine as you’d like to think! No way no how is bottled water eco-friendly. Watch Tapped to learn more.

Builds immunity Are you kidding me? This one takes the cake! Sugar laden cereals like this one actually can work to deplete your child’s immunity. Sugar is an anti-nutrient. In addition to the spray on vitamins (which supposedly boost your kid’s immunity) this cereal contains hydrogenated  soybean and/or cottonseed oil. You already know how I feel about cotton! The one word banner on this one should be Hazardous.

No Trans Fat is one of those phrases that puts us at ease. Sadly many many products boasting no trans fat are lying. There is a “loophole”: food packagers are allowed to round transfat measurements down to the nearest gram. And of course, they play games with serving size. In addition to sneaking in hydrogenated oils, manufacturers will put in palm oil which does not contain trans fat but this ingredient has a devastating effect on rainforests. In the long run, Palm Oil is more dangerous to our future than just about any other hazardous ingredient I rant about. No doubt you’ve read my piece about how the Girl Scouts should re-think their toxic cookie campaigns.

What to do? As Michael Pollan says, avoid food products that make health claims. We must take the time and buy real food, not foodlike products. In the long run, you’ll save money, your health and the planet. The three products I showed above have a huge carbon footprint and probably use more fossil fuels than your car does. Pay your local farmer, not your doctor. Take the time, cook from scratch. Eat food you can believe in. Don’t pay good money for lies.

Earlier this week, I wrote a guest post in The Slow Cook and the Better DC School Food blogs about sugar in schools. In this article, I barely scraped the surface of this issue. Sugars are not just “empty calories”, sugar is a major anti-nutrient that can wreck havoc with your health.

The confusion over sugar continues. After all, fruit contains sugar, and what about beets and carrots?  My teacher and mentor Joan Gussow  once famously said  “I prefer butter to margarine because I trust cows more than chemists.”  I too, trust Mother Nature more than food companies. Carrots, beets and fruit are fine. In fact, they are really good for you!

Nowadays, many people understand that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is bad news. The beverage industry is responding by putting “cane sugar” into their drinks. Jones Soda boasts of having “pure cane sugar” in their soda, Pepsi is now boasting of “real sugar” in their Throwback brands that are being blasted all over Facebook and Twitter.  Vitamin Water with “crystalline fructose” is now showing up as a healthier alternative in school cafeterias (its not!).

Somehow consumers didn’t get the big picture message: refined sugar is bad for you! That refined sugar could have aliases like HFCS or cane sugar or crystalline fructose (found in Coca Cola’s Vitamin Water). All of this stuff will rot your teeth, expand your waistline, raise your cholesterol, the list goes on and on.

The World Health Organization defines free sugars as all monosaccharides and disaccharides added to foods by the manufacturer, cook or consumer, plus sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juices.

One other point worth mentioning: fruit juice = sugar hit. A glass of 100% juice is NOT the same as eating a piece of fruit! As a matter of fact, your morning glass of OJ can be contributing to your high cholesterol. Parents who think they are doing their kids a favor by giving them Minute Maid Lemonade or  Snapple 100% juice for an afterschool snack are damaging their kid’s livers, making them even more hungry, and of course, helping to make their dentists rich.

Apparently, fructose makes it so you don’t feel full. Makes complete sense that food manufacturers would want to use HFCS in their products. If you don’t feel full, you’ll keep eating and drinking. Great for a food company’s shareholders, not so great for your health.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg and the Center for Science in the Public Interest have declared war on salt. They claim salt is a major factor in heart disease and stroke.  Perhaps they should take a good long look at sugar! They’ll find a connection to diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and much much more.

Bottom line:

Eat Real Food. Drink Water.

Now that the Girl Scout Cookie sales have started, I can’t sit by and stay silent about the atrocities that these well meaning scouts are innocently perpetrating on their families, their friends and even the planet. I’m well aware that these cookies have a place in the hearts and minds of so many people. My mom was a  troop leader and the cookie chair when I was a kid. When I was a much younger, more naive mom, I was part of the cookie craze. My daughter got a big fancy badge one year because we staked out her sister’s child care center and sold them out of the back of my van!  I’m no longer that young and innocent. Now that I know what I know about the ingredients of Girl Scout cookies, I can’t eat them, I don’t let my kids eat them and I really want to encourage you not to buy or eat them either.

This is not about childhood obesity or that word, “moderation”.  I’m fine with a few cookies every now and then. I’ll buy Tate’s cookies or whip up a batch of my own.  It’s not about the calories or even the fat grams in Girl Scout cookies.

Here’s a link to the Nutrition information for this years Girl Scout cookies. It’s not the nutrition information, the calories or grams of trans fats that I’m concerned about.  Its the INGREDIENTS. You’ll need to magnify the page to be able to read them. For the most part, they got rid of any High Fructose Corn Syrup. Little Brownie Bakers knows that moms no longer tolerate HFCS as an ingredient. They’ve replaced it with sugar. It’s not the corn syrup or the sugar that is keeping me and my kids away from these cookies.

It’s the poor quality oils that will keep me from buying Girl Scout cookies.

The Tagalongs, Thin Mints, Samoas and DoSiDos contain cottonseed oil. Let’s start with the fact that cotton is not a food. My pal, Dr. Andrew Weil says no way is cottonseed oil okay. It is loaded with pesticide residue, cotton is one of the most highly sprayed crops. Since cotton crops are under far less chemical regulation that other other crops used specifically for food, many pesticides or chemicals can be used on cotton crops that are illegal for use on food crops, how creepy is that? This oil is super cheap, so a cookie company looking to make a super cheap product will use this ingredient. In addition to the pesticide residue, cottonseed oil is extremely high in inflammatory Omega 6 oil. The ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 in cottonseed oil is 259:1. For optimal health, we want a ratio of 2 parts Omega 6 to 1 part Omega 3.  If you’re trying to increase your Omega 3 for health reasons, and you eat an edible foodlike substance like a Girl Scout Cookie made with cottonseed oil, you’ll have to guzzle a gallon of fish oil or flaxseed oil to balance out our omega 6:3 ratio!  Plain and simple: cottonseed oil is a hazardous ingredient that you don’t want your family ingesting.

Besides personal health, Girl Scout cookies endanger planetary health as well. That’s a bold statement, huh?  The more I’ve learned about food and food systems, the more I’ve learned about our fragile environment. Here’s why I make that statement. Every single flavor of Girl Scout Cookies this year contains Palm Oil. What’s so bad about palm oil? While it is a saturated fat, that’s not why I don’t want my kids to be eating it. I use lots of saturated fats in my cooking: butter, coconut oil even some duck fat and occasional bacon grease! Saturated fat is not the issue.

The issue is environmental. To grow palm oil, we destroy rain forests. Its not just about destroying the  planet’s  most biodiverse  ecosystems which are home to millions of plant and animal species, including highly endangered orangutans, clouded leopards, and sun bears. Its about creating runaway climate change that will impact our future on this planet. I’m not making this up- read more about it here from the Rainforest Action Network.

Now that my girls are older, I can look forward to the future when I will be a grandma. I hope to take the time to bake cookies with my grandkids, just like my grandma did with me. If we keep plowing down rainforests in the name of cheap oil to put in cheap cookies, I might never get a chance to see grandkids.

Parents of scouts: please don’t have your kids sell these cookies. Take some time, make some real cookies, make a donation to the Girl Scouts, it’s a great organization. I’d like to see their cookies go extinct. There are so many other worthwhile fundraisers that are good for people and for the planet. Please pass this on to anyone you know who  cares about the fate of the earth and hopes to have grandkids one day.

There has been an explosion of food and nutrition related books over the past few years. People ask me all the time what books to read to get up to speed with food. Not to overwhelm you, I taken my top 100 favorite books on the subject and cooked that list down to just 7. These are not cookbooks or nutrition texts, but you’ll learn lots about both from reading them.

1. Animal, Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, this book tells the story of how one family was changed by a year of deliberately eating food produced in the place where they live. Kingsolver, a well known writer of fiction, poetry and creative non fiction whose works include The Poisonwood Bible has a way with words that will inspire you

2. Every eater could benefit from reading some Michael Pollan, this journalism professor has been telling the story of America’s food system for many years now.

Food Rules: An Eater’s Guide is his most recent best selling book. Short, sweet and to the point, it was written at the request of a doctor who wanted a simple book to hand to his patients. I’ve used it with 4th year medical students to get them up to speed.

Want to read more by Pollan? Your next step would be to check out  In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto which came out last year. A more in depth read than Food Rules but equally compelling.

If you’re up for an epic read, then grab a copy of  The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals a deeper exploration of our food system.  A new children’s version came out this year which is aimed at the middle school level.

Pollan’s pieces in the NY Times have provoked many conversations. You can grab all of them online with a simple google search. You’ll find Mr. Pollan all over the Internet these days including this provocative interview on Democracy Now

3. Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of three novels. Becoming a dad and owning a dog caused him to re-think his food choices and write a book about it. His book, Eating Animals makes a good case case for decreasing your meat consumption as he shares the dark realities of more than 90% of animal agriculture in America.

4. Joan Gussow, a professor at Columbia Teachers College, has been way ahead of her time for many years. Her PhD thesis revolved around counting calories: how many calories it took to ship a tomato from California to NY. When I first met her back in the late 90′s she completely transformed my mindset about food. This Organic Life remains one of my most favorite books on the topic. Like Kingsolver, her book is sprinkled with recipes and the story of her life that builds your Food IQ in a very digestible way.

5. Science writer Susan Allport wrote a book about fat that reads like a nutritional detective story. The Queen of Fats will teach you all about  the Omega 3  fats that  have become the latest health food nutrient much like oat bran was in the 90’s. Read this for some important information about fats, one of the most misunderstood macronutrients.

6. Nina Planck is a food writer and farmer’s market entrepreneur who grew up on a farm. Her  well researched books will surprise you as she explains why butter and lard are good for you and corn oil and soy milk are not.Real Food: What to Eat and Why and her most recent book, Real Food for Mother and Baby: The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two, and Baby’s First Foods are great reads and will cause you to re-think the role of traditional foods in your diet.

7. Last but not least on my list of 7 is a small but powerful book written by  Buddhist monk and human rights activist, Thich Nhat Hanh. His book,  The World We Have links his concerns of environmental destruction to the Buddhist teachings of interconnectedness and the impermanence of all things. I guess the reason I’m including this one is you’ll need a strategy to reduce any anxiety that may arise from reading  the other books. Its an eloquent little book that includes a chapter entitled Diet for a Mindful Planet.

Last night while most of the country was watching the Super Bowl, I was learning about fructose metabolism. A lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist held my attention for over 90 minutes as he explained how fructose, present in both fruit juice and most soda can act as a poison in our livers. This revelation makes loads of sense to me, both personally and professionally.

Since the popularity of Atkins and South Beach diets, many of us have understood how refined carbohydrates can lead to high trigylcerides and fat accumulation. But many nutritionists and health professionals  continue to believe that  a calorie is a calorie and all sugars act the same in the body.  Dr. Lustig proceeded to blast those theories out of the sky with his lecture, demonstrating that fructose metabolism is eerily similar to alcohol metabolism in the liver.

High levels of fructose do not just appear in our diets in the form of High Fructose Corn Syrup. Most people, with the exception of employees of Coke and Pepsi, now agree that our increased soda consumption plays a role in the obesity epidemic.  Fructose is also abundantly present in fruit juices, which have been promoted as a healthy beverage since the Nixon administration.

According to Dr. Lustig, fructose acts as a toxin in the liver resulting in a non alcoholic fatty liver and leads to gout and hypertension by creating excess uric acid. Not only are we seeing fat kids, we have increased incidence of hypertension and gout in young patients. Bottom line: we were never meant to be able to metabolize these abnormally high amounts of fructose.  By eliminating all forms of sugary beverages and adopting a water or milk only strategy, you can be on your way to reversing weight gain and other metabolic damage.

It will be very hard to pull fruit juice out of schools, now that the soda industry owns brands like Tropicana (Pepsi) and Minute Maid (Coca Cola), but after watching this lecture, many will agree its an important next step. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of juice thanks to the damage I’ve seen it create in children’s teeth. I’ve always advised parents to eat the fruit instead to get the entire benefit that Mother Nature intended: fiber, micronutrients all in the right proportions.

Don’t take my word for it. Watch this lecture yourself and see if you start to re-think your drinks. Warning: some complex biochemistry will be shown, that a science nerd like me loves. Just breathe and go with it, you’ll be glad you did!