Parents should replace juice and fizzy drinks with jugs of water at mealtimes, diet experts have advised, to reduce their children’s sugar intake and cut their risk of obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes.
Senior health scientists said today that sugar-sweetened drinks were the biggest source of sugar intake across all ages, but were a particular problem among children and teenagers.
Despite recent calls for a tax on sugary drinks and cuts to sugar content in everyday foods, Susan Jebb, professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford, said that “very simple advice” to parents could play an even bigger part in improving children’s diets.
“Drink water, that’s the very simple advice to parents,” she said. “Encourage your children to drink water. Once they’ve been weaned, children ought to be drinking water…There is a whole range of drinks out there, [but] I don’t need to encourage people to be drinking any of the others. I can firmly stick to encouraging people to getting their fluid from water.”
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