The completely amazing Margot and I were chatting over email today about kids and sugar and if there is a big impact on kids’ behavior when they have sugar. We agreed that there is, but we aren’t sure how much as everyone’s kids consume varying degrees of sugar.
Ask yourself this: how much sugar do we knowingly or unknowingly give our kids?
How much sugar hides in that chocolate, dried fruit, Milo, cookies, juice, cooldrink and cereal we give them? How hard would it be to not give them sugar, even if it was only for 48 hours?
We have therefore decided to not give our kids any sugar for 48 hours and see if it would make any difference to how they behave.
I then spoke to Tanya about it and she was keen to challenge parents as well. (note how we don’t exclude the Dads..)
So here’s the challenge:
Starting on Wednesday morning up to and including Thursday evening not a crumb of sugar shall cross the lips of a (willing or unwilling or unaware) participant and we shall convene on the interwebs on Friday to see the results via a poll right here.
What we really want to know is how it made you feel to not have any sugar at the end of the 48 hours and if you could see or feel a difference in yourself and your kids when you woke up on Friday morning.
It’s only 2 days. Who is in?
PS: The #tag on twitter is #sugarfree48
PPS: If you are curious about food labels go and have a look at the nifty guide Discovery put together on reading food labels, it is very cool
I would willingly participate but how does one substitute. I will not feed my kids sweetners – it’s worse than sugar. Maybe I can if we do eggs and toast for breakfast.
Hi Cat,
An adding you to the list if participants 🙂
Did you manage to have a look at the list of suggestions?
I have just come back from a parents ADHD seminar where they had brilliant speakers on various topics. In short, this is what I have learned: SUGAR MAKES YOU STUPID!
I am soooooo taking part in this.
Hey Jules,
Let me know if you found the info helpful and if you need anything else?
I’ll give it a bash, but there’s no way that I would be able to give them their tea without sugar.
Hi Madelein, I would love to hear how it goes, please let me know if it made a difference?
Can I add your name to the list?
Have you looked at maybe replacing their sugar with Xylitol?
A good substitute for sugar is Xylitol. It has none of the adverse effects of sugar and actually good for the teeth!
Agree, it is so much better.
Well done and thanks for the post. I have had no sugar for the last month as an experiment and it has made a HUGE difference for me. Measuring cholesterol change next week to see if it impacts that too. Am also obsessed with no sugar for my 1 year old son – to date he has never had sugar in any of his food and gets no fruit juice either, a bad source of sugar with no fibre to slow down the liver’s “knee jerk” reaction to sugar overload. He loves a diverse range of natural flavours, even things we think of as sour. Have to learn to read labels though – shopping takes ages!!!
Thank you for your comment, it means so much!
I’m also on a mission to de-mystify food labels because of all my son’s food issues. It takes time, but once you have your head around it it is in equal measures liberating and horrifying to know what goes into the things we buy every day.