Children and juice consumption has been on my mind lately due in part to a nutritional analysis I have been participating in for the last eight months. Through our school, we were hooked up with a nutritional student who followed what our youngest daughter ate and drank. The idea was to gather information about peoples habits, perceptions and knowledge about eating well and childhood obesity. In our meetings, I was asked many questions concerning all these areas. One questions was “Does juice consumption in children create health problems in their future?” The answer, as I suspected, was yes. More than soda, children who drank more than 12 ounces of juice a day were more likely to be obese as adults. This one habit factors into future health more than any other lifestyle choice. Another question was about the amount of sugar in 100% juice versus the sugar content of soda and juice drinks. Surprise! They all have about the same amount of sugar. Though they take the forms of sucrose and fructose, sugar is sugar and it is now proven to be an obvious factor in childhood and adult obesity. Parents take care. It is vitally important to offer kids a wide range of drinks, and juice can be one of them. But limit their intake the same way you might limit soda consumption. What we put in our bodies now does pay forward to adulthood.