• Does the long-life juice in the carton contain vitamins?
• Long-term juices in children's nutrition
• What do you offer a child to drink instead of juice from a carton?
• Fruit and herbal teas for children

Children eagerly drink 100% cartoned juices. They like them because they're sweet, and parents are happy to buy them because they're convenient to use, have a fairly long shelf life even after opening, and, since they're 100% fruit, they're likely to contain vitamins, making them healthy. Is that true? Let's check it out!

Does the long-life juice in the carton contain vitamins?

Fruit juices, as the name suggests, are made from fruit. They contain vitamins and nutrients that come from those fruits. However, the more processed these juices are, the less nutritional value they contain. Freshly squeezed juice made at home and drunk immediately contains the most vitamins. Unpasteurized, store-bought juice, which can be consumed within a day, contains fewer vitamins. However, such juices run the risk of bacteria having already developed in them. 100% shelf-life juices are usually juices reconstituted from concentrate or frozen fruit pulp. They are pasteurized and therefore have fewer vitamins than the other two types of juice mentioned above, which is why synthetic vitamins are often added to them, but the body's absorption rate of these vitamins is lower than that of the naturally occurring vitamins in fruit .

Long-term juices in children's nutrition

Once a child has tried sweet juice, they're usually more likely to drink it than the water recommended by nutritionists. Parents, however, are willing to accept this choice, because, in addition to sugar, juice also contains vitamins and is a better choice than an artificial, carbonated drink. However, long-term juice consumption is not the same as eating fresh fruit, and if it becomes the only beverage a child consumes all day, it can do more harm than good. Why is this?

Cartoned juices are very different from fresh fruit. Most commercially available products are highly processed. Although they aren't artificially sweetened, they contain large amounts of simple sugars. Fruit sugar, or fructose, is the simple sugar the body has to deal with. Excess of it is just as harmful as regular white sugar (from sugar beets). Therefore, when a child eats fruit, they are providing the body with not only fructose but also all the fiber contained in the fruit, where sugar is less harmful, as well as all the vitamins and minerals.

The juice in the carton is almost free of fiber and some vitamins and minerals. Artificial vitamin C is added to most juices. When a child drinks a glass of juice, they ingest about 4-6 teaspoons of sugar. This leads, among other things, to a reduced appetite for other, new products. Children who drink a lot of cartoned juice throughout the day rarely feel like eating lunch. Not because they are picky, but because they consume two glasses of 100% juice in between meals, they provide about 50g of simple sugars—about 10 teaspoons of sugar. The body, which has received about 400 calories, refuses to absorb more. Excess sugar contributes to acidification and impairs the absorption of zinc, iron, magnesium, and calcium. Children who drink large amounts of juice are more likely to develop anemia. Furthermore, their excessive consumption contributes to childhood obesity.

What do you offer a child to drink instead of juice from a carton?

It's best to get our children used to drinking water from an early age—spring water, low-mineralized water, or boiled tap water. Water is the best thirst quencher, and children who are accustomed to drinking it from an early age won't feel deprived. However, this is easier to believe than to implement, because sooner or later the child will have the opportunity to reach for a sweet juice or other sweet drink—be it at a friend's birthday party or at a worried grandmother's. What can you offer a child who refuses to drink water? We can try to diversify regular water by adding fruit to it. Then we can have flavored water, for example, with the addition of lemon, strawberries, oranges, fresh watermelon, or pineapple. To sweeten the homemade flavored water a little, you can add a little honey or maple syrup. Even if we add a large spoonful of honey, maple syrup or even sugar to half a liter of water, it will definitely be less simple sugar than juices, drinks or store-bought flavored waters.

From one year of age, children can also enjoy freshly squeezed juices, homemade fruit purees, or mixed fruit, but no more than half a glass per day. However, it's worth considering giving your child fresh fruit instead of pureed juice.

Fruit and herbal teas for children

When the baby is one year old, we can also start giving delicate herbal infusions and fruit teas (some even from the age of four months), for example:

• Mint,
• from nettle,
• with rose and sea buckthorn,
• from fennel,
• Linden,
• Elder,
• with lavender,
• Strawberry,
• Chamomile,
• Rooibos.

Black tea is not recommended for very young children due to its high theine and tannin content. Weak black tea infusions should not be given to children under 1 year of age. One of the first to recommend rooibos tea instead. Fennel or chamomile tea have been known for generations and can be consumed by children as young as 4 months old.

In fact, fruit juices are not nutritionally essential in the diet of children up to the age of three, and no more than half a glass should be given to a child per day. Excessive consumption can impair the absorption of vitamins and minerals, including zinc and iron, as well as suppress appetite and promote obesity and poor eating habits. Therefore, it's good to teach a child to drink water, fruit, and herbal teas from an early age. Once your little one has tried sweet juices, they'll probably crave them more often, and nothing will happen if they occasionally drink such juice from a carton. However, good habits and habits established in the early years of life stay with children for years.