Is fatlogic unstoppable? 40% of American adults are now obese—and so are 13.9% of children between 2 and 5 years old
archive.is/kJHrt
archive.isPosted Mar 25, 2018, 12:44 AM UTC
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archive.isWe need increased awareness of calories, CICO, the calorie contents of foods/drinks (such as knowing that juice isn't a diet drink vs soda, etc.), recognizing the difference between food cravings and genuine hunger, proper cardio, etc. These things should be taught young, blasted everywhere, drilled in repeatedly from kindergarten or first grade on no different than reading and writing and math. That's the only solution I see.
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such as knowing that juice isn't a diet drink vs soda
Here's the problem: conventional wisdom and the USDA's nutritional advice considers juice to be healthy. In fact, the USDA considers 1 cup of fruit and 1 cup of 100% fruit juice to be equivalent. They recommend 1–2 cups of fruit for children depending on age, so parents reasonably assume giving kids that much fruit juice is OK. They do suggest giving cut fruit instead of juice for fiber, but that's about it.
Check out the difference:
|1 C honeycrisp apples|1 C 100% apple juice (Kroger) :--|:--|:-- Calories|80|110 Total Carbs|22 g|27 g Dietary Fiber|5 g|0 g Sugars |17 g|26 g Vitamin A |2%|0 % Vitamin C|20%|120% Calcium|2%|0 % Iron|2%|0%
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That’s horrifying. I had no idea juice was considered “healthy”. All it takes is one look at the calories and sugar.
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I remember when I was a kid, drinking orange juice was thought to be healthy because of vitamin C.
Now that I pay attention to things like nutrition.... I know 1) that vitamin C is in so many foods that don't have as much sugar, like bell peppers, broccoli, tomatoes, all sorts of foods and 2) vitamin C is a water soluble nutrient. Your body is only going to use so much of it, and the excess will be peed out.
But tell that to my boss who starts passing out vitamin C packets to everyone in the office the second anyone has a sniffle. MIght as well just be like "Here, here's something for you to pee out later"
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While vitamin c is a water soluble vitamin, apparently we can store up to a month's worth in the liver, which is why scurvy is harder to get than would be otherwise.
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I doubt you pee as much as you assume.
When I was really ill, I was getting Intravenous Vit C-and that was about 25,000 units of it.
Vit C is really good for you!
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Juice was originally considered healthy because it was made from actual fruits. These days everything is “made from concentrate” which is just adding a bunch of extra stuff to it. If anything, they need to either specify their current guidelines or update them to fit this century/decades worth of nutritional knowledge
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No, concentrate just means they heated or some other way removed a great deal of the water. 100% juice is, and always was, considerably worse for you than whole fruit. The difference is availability. 30+ years ago, it wasn't nearly as cheap to give juice as it was to give in season whole fruit. Plus, I think parents have gotten lazier, and juice is easy.
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Even without additives, juice in general is just the sugar and water content separated from the fibers of the fruit. The fibers act as an inhibitor, they both slow the absorption of fruit sugars when eaten, and they also satiate better. Whereas with juice, you can easily down several servings' worth of fruit in a few seconds, and you're not really getting fibers, you're just drinking sugar calories and it doesn't really satiate all that well.
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Is this an american thing? In Denmark most juice is 100% fruit, and only has the natural sugar found in food.
Generally, it's quite healthy. It would be like eating a banana, an apple and maybe a kiwi or something. It has calories, of course, but the food itself is healthy.
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They’ve got that type of juice available as well in the US (alongside the concentrate ones); it’s the sheer amount of juice that gets consumed that seems to be the issue. Eating an orange isn’t the same as drinking a glass of orange juice- it takes several oranges to make one glass of juice, which means the glass of juice has much more sugar and calories than just eating an orange, minus a lot of the fibre.
BBC did a feature on this one time; where they handed one person a carton of orange juice, the other person a bowl of oranges, and waited to see who tapped out first. The juice drinker plowed through sugar and calories, whereas the the orange eater was finished at a much lower intake of sugar and calories.
Sorry this went so long. I find this sort of thing really interesting. :)
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In Switzerland too, and they have to call it "nectar" otherwise. But I am sure most people don't care.
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“Healthy” is relative. Even if its is 100% natural, the fact that so many fruits are needed to make just one glass of juice concentrates the sugar to a very UN-NATURAL degree. For example, one serving of 100% natural grape juice can have almost 40 grams (!!!) of sugar. Imagine how many whole grapes would you have to eat to get that same amount of sugar!
Much of my weight gain was due to drinking 100% natural “healthy” fruit juice.
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I used to work at a grocery store and one of my jobs was to make fresh squeezed orange juice. We didn't add any sugar or water or anything else, it was just pure juice. I was allowed to give out free samples. We used valencia oranges and people were surprised at how ultra sweet it was. (they could see me making it so they knew it didn't have added sugar) But they thought it was still good for you because it was "natural" sugar.
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Yea, the fiber slows the sharp spike in insulin.
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I blame the USDA, FDA, CDC and other government agency for a lot of the obesity epidemic. They have now for 40 plus years cared more about the perfect diet then the good enough CICO just eat enough calories to be in the healthy weight BMI range and everything else will work it self out range. In the West macro deficits are rare and micro deficiencies basically make the news.
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I'm also going to blame all the doctors and health/gym teachers who pounded on "exercise, exercise, exercise!" as the one and only way to lose weight for decades. Because god forbid if you start telling kids how calories work and how to log their eating, then they'll magically catch An Eating Disorder and starve to death. And I blame the NIH, for saying all this time that 1000 cal/day for women and 1200 cal/day for men is the absolute minimum anyone should ever go, EVAAR. Meanwhile, we just learned from The Lancet that eating ~850 cal/day for a few months and maintaining the weight loss will cure Type 2 Diabetes in 90% of patients! Omfg why are doctors not screaming this from the rooftops!?
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I'm also gonna blame all those talk shows and magazines that act like the only way to lose weight is to have some weird diet. Also, nutrition labels that use 2000 calories a day as the baseline.
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Omfg why are doctors not screaming this from the rooftops!?
"Eat less" isn't profitable.
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I think the USDA's mission is too muddied. They're the regulatory and advocacy organization of agriculture, and they also own giving nutritional advice. There's a lot of conflict there, and money from agricultural business wins out.
They recommend three cups of low-fat dairy products for every adult, regardless of their BMR/TEE.
In general, 1 cup of milk, yogurt, or soymilk (soy beverage), 1 ½ ounces of natural cheese, or 2 ounces of processed cheese can be considered as 1 cup from the Dairy Group.
https://www.choosemyplate.gov/dairy
3 cups of skim milk is 270 calories. As a sedentary, 5' 3", 120 lb woman my TEE is around 1400 kcal—three cups of dairy is 19% of that! However, it would only be 12% of my husband's.
It's really messed up. The US government is so beholden to lobbyist money that there's no hope of getting evidence-based, bias-free nutritional advice out of it.
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A person shouldn’t have to randomly come across r/loseit just to learn about CICO and all the diet myths. I had heard about calories before reddit, but I didn’t know they actually MEANT fat loss/gain.
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Yes. I mentioned something about fat being extra storage to my 13 year old students and they were like what?? That's what fat is? So like someone with more fat would survive starvation longer??
And I was like yess...fat is storage because you ate more calories than you needed. Like what did you think fat was???
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13.9% of children between 2 and 5 are obese
this really makes me sad. they don't even get a chance to know what healthy eating habits are.
40% is also ridiculous, and that's just the obesity rate. isn't overweight at about 80% now or something?
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The really painful irony is that it’s actually worse than 40/80, because BMI is inaccurate and actually under_reports obesity. Skinnyfat people get misreported as healthy despite having all the risks of being overweight, and are numerous enough to matter. Over_fat people are estimated at ~90%.
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it's a terrible world we live in that people often spout that same line about BMI being inaccurate because they think it defends their overweight status, not realizing that they are likely even worse off than it states
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For most western countries, the estimated overfat numbers are in the 90-94% range. Adding in that 2-3% of the population is underweight, the number of actually healthy weight people is about 5%.
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That's absolutely insane and terrifying.
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Wouldn't a large share of underweight people be "normal fat" though?
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That's definitely possible, but I don't have any idea for what the relative proportion would be between underfat and normal fat underweight people. The cutoff for being underweight (BMI 18.5) is pretty low. You'd have to be really sedentary and have no muscle in order to be normal fat or overfat at an underweight BMI.
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WHAT IN GODS NAME??? literally direct me to a source please!?!?
I thought we were still at "2/3 of Americans are overweight." NOT MOST OF THE DAMN COUNTRY.
Edit: a word
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These were estimates of how much of the population is overfat. If you're sedentary, then you'll still have an unhealthy body fat percentage at the upper end of the healthy BMI range. So, even though 70% of the US has a BMI > 25, even more people are overfat.
I'm on mobile right now, but I remember seeing a big ranking of all the countries in the EU and North America on this sub. They were just estimates of body fat percentage, I think using waist to height ratio. Iceland topped the list, surprisingly. It was something like 94%. I remember one of the comments in the thread was basically, "yeah, the hiking stuff is for the tourists. The actual Icelanders eat fast food and drive around everywhere in SUVs."
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Hate to bear bad news, but here we are. 2/3 is optimistic even globally speaking, the US is miles away from that by now.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170724105111.htm
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I work in a daycare and there is a mom who regularly brings her barely one-year-old child chick-fil-a for lunch instead of having him eat the healthy lunches provided by the school. He's definitely overweight and it's so sad. He's being set up for lifelong health problems at such a young age, breaks my heart. We desperately need better nutrition education in America.
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hey, at least it isn't mcdonalds, right? /s
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Oh man yes. I know too many people that think one fast food restaurant is automatically healthier than another, without realizing you can eat garbage at Subway and low calorie at McDonald’s.
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Yes Fatlogic is unstoppable and its well beyond too late. I will stick to my downvoted guns and say Obesity is a bigger threat to human beings than Global warming.
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Obesity contributes to global warming. Overeating means more land to cultivate more food and feed more animals which creates more waste.
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In addition, they're more likely to eat meat often. It takes a shit ton more land to raise a pig for slaughter than it does to grow some carrots.
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Well, if it's any consolation to you, I don't think you'll be downvoted for that statement here.
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Probably not on this sub, anyways.
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You never know what you're gonna get downvoted for on reddit. Lol
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Public health experts said that they were alarmed by the continuing rise in obesity among adults and by the fact that efforts to educate people about the health risks of a poor diet do not seem to be working.
Alarmed? Really?
Your educational budget is a teeny sliver of the processed food industry's marketing budget. How effective can healthy messaging be, when it's drowned out? Have you EVER seen an ad for MyPlate or the WHO nutrition guidelines on reddit or facebook? How many ads for food are there, though? What about in the mail? We get dozens and dozens of coupons for fast food - nothing from the goverment to educate us on healthy eating.
It's not alarming. It is the predictable outcome, in a culture that prioritizes profits over societal wellbeing. Industry is allowed free speech, even when it impedes our individual freedoms in substantial ways. Leading a healthy life is part of "the pursuit of happiness." Drowning out unbiased information with Chester the cheeto animal and poptarts is a violation of our freedom to control our own thoughts.
I dont see it changing; i think we're too far gone. If you even bring up consumer protections in advertising, the words censorship are thrown out against you. It wasnt harmful censorship to put labels on cigarettes and to limit the range of their advertising, but people will NOT consider it for things like the food industry. They just wont.
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I really wish the government would do a big public service campaign on eating and calories. There's so much misinformation out there that it's kind of hard to blame people for not knowing better. Apparently the rising obesity rate is making it harder to find people who are fit to serve in the military, so maybe if that becomes a big thing the government will finally do something.
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I think that's a great idea, as part of a multipronged approach. Sadly, i dont think they can compete, budgetwise, with the food industry's marketing and visibility, and unless that's Iimited, there will be no change.
How the food industry markets things like processed cereal as healthy (now with 1/3 less sugar, good source of 8 vitamins and minerals!) 's actually a really fascinating parallel to the political disinformation campaign. By flooding the consumer with information that's factually true but lacks appropriate context (Context for Claim #1: one-third less than 12 grams of added sugar per 28 gr serving, is still 8 gr added sugars. That is a significant portion of the WHO daily added sugar recommendations of 25 grams of added sugars per day. (1) This assumes you're actually eating 1 serving of the cereal, and unless you use a food scale, you probably eat more. Context for claim #2: the micronutrient per calorie density of most whole foods is far higher than in these processed foods like sugared cereals .(2) ) and by using a multipronged PR/marketing approach (they market to you AND to kids; they market on radio, billboards, vending machine presences, sales inserts in mail), the public gets lost in the details of the different processed foods and forgets about the bigger picture, of what is actually not being marketed (unprocessed + lightly processed whole foods) -- leading to a normalization of processed foods, an abandonment of a healthy food culture based on whole foods, where we share shopping, cooking, and eating with our families, and remain connected to our food by doing little things, like taking a trip to a berry farm or growing parsley (or more if you have space), as social activities to enjoy together. That culture is dying in the US- the culture of enjoying healthy food together. That's what we were actually sold, in processed foods - death of that culture.
Dont get me wrong. Food processing is great. Frozen precleaned veg and fruit are a lifesaver! And i use jarred tomato sauce as well, i chew gum. Now and then, a processed food is fine, and in moderation theyre ok. But it isnt supposed to be eaten how it is in america, supplacing whole foods from your diet.
Just my opinion, anyway. Im not an expert.
(1) http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-guideline/en/
(2) see table in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overall_nutritional_quality_index
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You're right that competing with the food industry would be difficult. Especially considering that the food industry would likely oppose such a campaign and spend countless dollars lobbying against it.
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This is why I believe nationalization would do wonders.
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Not part of that 40% anymore. Wooooooo!
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Me too! So excited! Congrats man it feels good.
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Congrats man!
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I never was!
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Two centuries ago, the idea that there would be enough food to render 40% of the population obese was unthinkable, much less a population of this size. It’s incredible how quickly we’ve gone from a world in which starvation is an ever present danger to one in which most people can kill themselves with excess calories.
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Don't worry, with the environmental collapse that's taking place it's likely going to reverse pretty fast...
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that's really sad :(
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It's crazy that such an avoidable problem is so mainstream. Weight gain is simple at its core and it doesn't take some genius to understand and lose weight...
Just disappointing that its beneficial for some to keep the majority in the dark.
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not only that but kids...kids are developing type 2 diabetes from their weight. and of course heavy parents have heavy kids because they teach them overeating is acceptable.
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Depressing because I'm sure their parents care about them, but they are expressing it in the wrong way.
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agreed.
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With the internet, ignorance is no longer an excuse. Most people just don’t want to know the truth, they would rather eat the calories.
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Meteors, Ice Age, Earthquakes, Plague, too many ways to erase out a whole race but let's go with eating disorder... Natural selection is just fucking with us right now.
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I honestly cannot get my kid to eat more. I suppose if I let him eat cookies and junk unchecked but... My two year old is thinning out because he is so active and he eats what I perceive as a lot for a toddler. I don’t understand how 2 year olds become obese. I don’t.
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Childhood obesity is child abuse. Full stop.
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I agree. I’d have to force feed my kid at this stage to break his hunger cues. He has gone an entire dinner only eating the vegetable portion 😒
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Like with some adults there are kids who are just self regulating and know when to stop eating and then there are many who don't. My six year old hardly ever eats until he's full but he's always been that way. He also has ADHD so I'm sure that factors into it because he can't focus long enough to put down a whole meal without wanting to wander off to do something else. Lol
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I’m also confused by this and think that it HAS to be genetics, or something else going on biologically because I couldn’t force my son to eat when he was a toddler, and I pretty much let him eat whatever he wanted. If he wasn’t hungry, he would refuse to eat. Toddlers are very intuitive when it comes to their appetite. So when we see an obese toddler, they’re appetite is controlling their intake. I think the overeating is a symptom, rather than the cause of whatever is happening with them. If that makes sense lol. I’ve been up all night and could’ve probably made that more coherent after some sleep. 😉
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Sugar is addicting so if they are given unchecked sugar they easily can fall into this trap. 🤷🏻♀️
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I sort of agree with you. The ability to gain a lot of weight is slightly controlled by genetics. I’ve definitely known kids with terrible diets that stay super slim until adulthood. But even if you have the genetic makeup to gain weight as a child, if you eat a good diet, you won’t be obese.
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I don’t know. Fat people are still people. We just need to figure out how to get rid of this health at every size bullshit. I’m sure there are people who can be perfectly healthy at a high weight. But it’s not as many as they say. And if your cholesterol and sugar and blood pressure are perfect when you’re 300 pounds and 30 you can bet it’s not going to stay that way. If there was some way that these people could understand that they can get healthy without hating themselves, that would be great.
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I'm still obese according to BMI, but i'm working hard on dropping the weight. My older brother and father are working out and my older brother is the healthiest at a normal weight and he has a gland problem, so no excuses for us. I hope to finally lose the weight and motivate my mom and little brother to lose weight, because they're very unhealthy.
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BMI is a bad metric especially if you have muscle or are athletic. Use a wholistic approach.
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That's true, but it atleast sets me a goal.
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Awesome. Work hard and learn a lot in your journey.
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Maybe not, they’re pretty good at killing themselves off.
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Public health experts said that they were alarmed by the continuing rise in obesity among adults and by the fact that efforts to educate people about the health risks of a poor diet do not seem to be working.
... What efforts? I rarely see ads on the subject, and health education in schools tends to be minimal or nonexistent. There's a ton of misinformation out there that it is difficult for people to know about healthy eating, healthy weight, and CICO. The government would need a serious, hardcore campaign to combat that misinformation, but I'm not seeing such an effort being made.
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Michelle Obama tried. The FA nutters screamed about how it was a war on obese children and other nutters screamed about how it was some conspiracy to… something something undermine parents and indoctrinate children.
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It’s happening here (UK) with the cancer research ads linking cancer to obesity . . .
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Yeah, that was so ridiculous. It wasn't even just FA folks going after her, plenty of people who just plain didn't like Obama and resented being told what they should do, even though they were being told "stop killing yourself with a shitty lifestyle".
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Unbelievably depressing. But I guess that makes the fit look better by comparison?
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Fat toddlers always kind of amaze me. That age group has a phenomenal metabolism because they are growing so much in height and they run around constantly. How much juice and Pixy Stix do these parents feed their kids?!
I've seen kids with sodas in their bottles and getting things like 5-6 cookies as a snack. People don't think young kids are capable of being fat but when they are being fed like that it's not surprising that it's on the rise.
I was thinking what can you feed an infant to make him/her fat.
I forgot soda
Also adding baby cereal to the bottle. My great niece is obese at a year old because they've been making her bottle incredibly thick with the stuff.
What the actal shit
My mom did this for me and my sister because she waa told it would be good for us. I've been in the low end of the BMI spectrum my entire life. The baby cereal isn't the problem. It's how much of it you're giving your kid.
What idiot puts that in the bottle, looks at it, then goes "Yeah, this is totally fine to give to my kid!"? For fuck's sake.
The documentary Fast Food Babies is amazing. If you haven't watched it, you definitely should.
There's a baby on there who's barely walking who gets 5 or 6 cans of Coke a DAY not to mention that they only feed him fast food. The parents were baffled as to why he's overweight and why he stays up all night. 🙄
Saw a clip on youtube about an obese 5 year old. Mother was in complete denial that she was the sole reason the kid got so fat. She fed him adult size portions of food and multiple meals during the day, yet still got angry and denied anything when called out. She privately got a wheelchair for him, completely unaware to the childs pediatrician, even though the kid could walk and the mom was literally pushing him to use the wheelchair instead of walking the few meters after school.
5-6 cans. Of. Coke?! Like. What?!
My son drinks milk from the tap, unsweetened almond milk with 1 tsp chocolate syrup (he never finishes a cup of milk 🙄), and water (that he does finish, my bottle included). So to recap: my toddler prefers water to most things. He will stop nursing to ask for water. So when people say they don’t like water, I know they have fucked themselves up. Breast milk is super sweet.
He has had apple juice—drinks 1 oz maybe—and 2 oz watermelon juice diluted with water on occasion.
But he does love cookies and cupcakes and chocolate. That’s easier to regulate. I can give him 2-3 chocolate chips, one cookie, one cupcake, etc and he is content vs moms that give endless juice cause that’s all their kid likes (lies).
My son is two almost three and thanks to my MIL, he definitely prefers juice and tea. But in my mind I'm thinking being a parent doesn't mean giving in to your kid's every want. If I did my son would be drinking a gallon of milk and juice everyday along with 2lbs of jelly beans. The amount of people just throwing junk at their kids and then hollering "Fed is best" at anyone who suggests that may not be a great idea is huge.
Omg MIL are the worst for this. My MIL introduced McDs to my daughter against my express wishes and tried to give her soda like, wtf?! Luckily my daughter is super picky so she only drinks water and milk and only ate the French fries. We'll do it as a treat every now and then but I tell my kids it's garbage food and I cook at home so they don't need it. I would never have fed it to her and I don't eat it at all because it upsets my stomach but, moderation is key to these things, eventually they'll be introduced to it in this society at least I can teach them it's unnecessary.
How does your son drink milk from the tap? You mean water, right?
Boobs.
Soda?! What? As a father with a two year old, I would NEVER think about putting soda in my son's bottle. I don't even think he ever had soda, come to think about it...
It's terrifying, isn't it? I can't believe the things I see parents feeding their kids. My 3.5 year old is literally just finding out what a lollipop is, and he thinks they're "yucky" because that's what I tell him. He had his first (and only) candy this past Halloween, and it was only a piece of a mini kit Kat. Like, I'm 100% responsible for what he eats, and he literally won't know the difference if you never even offer him the junk food.
My two year old gets candy. He loves veggies and fruits and other “healthy” stuff but he also loves chocolate. He gets like maybe max 50 calories of chocolate a day. I do let him tear into a chocolate bunny for pictures on Easter. He can ask for cookies all day, doesn’t get them.
I know :( The only chocolate my son ever had was a small square of expensive dark chocolate. He thought it was good. He never had a lollipop in his life, or other chocolates or sweets.
He gets fresh fruits and veggies every day, rice, and chicken as well. He never had fast food before, doesn't really like pizza that much, and doesn't like bread.
He does like milk though, and we are trying to replace some of it with water, on the dentist advice.
Interestingly enough, he's right where he should be with his weight.
No wonder why Americans are so large these days...
Mine hasn’t yet. My husband thinks I’m weird cause we dropped him at the care area for our holiday party with his water cup. I don’t mind juice that’s 100% juice every once in a while but most of those juice boxes have added sugar.
We DID try to give him ginger ale when he had a stomach bug. He refused to even try it.
I have some family members that gave their kids Mountain Dew in a bottle. I’m pretty sure they only did it once for each kid and it was only a little bit but they thought it was funny. These kids all grew up to be obese.
I never gave my kids Mountain Dew, and would kill anyone who adds it to my son's bottle (literally). Unhealthy food is not funny, and soda is terrible.
They're usually being fed adult portions (which is too much for an adult most times) of calorie heavy foods.
A lot of parents/adults have this idea in their head of the "cute pudgy toddler". Like, if your kid doesn't have a huge beer belly by age 2 then they're malnourished. And they'll go off on rants about how other parents are abusing their children because they aren't clearly overweight.
They treat their kids like they treat their pets. They want their object of affection to reflect THEIR values, rather than what's actually correct. Can almost guarantee the parent of a fat toddler has a fat pet too (if they have one), because "LIKE OMG SO CUTE".
My mom’s friend has one kid who used to be a fat baby. Like, Michelin Man, rolls on rolls on rolls fat. Then, around three years old, she shot up like a weed, and thinned out dramatically. So then mom’s friend suddenly had people confronting her about whether her daughter was getting enough to eat, because she’s a beanpole now.
No guys, she just got taller. Toddlers do that.
Mine has a huge belly at 2. His arms and legs tho. Also that belly is like his organs. Edit: I guess it’s not huge but comparatively it is.
https://i.imgur.com/HbxahPp.jpg
To be fair, beer bellies are pretty normal on toddlers. My toddler is thinnish, but she has a perma Santa-belly. I imagine that as she grows and her intestines have somewhere else to go, she'll lose it.
It's crazy that they become heavy!!! I never force fed our Son. When he said he was done eating, well then he was done. I offered lots of colors and textures for him to eat. His eating would cycle, some days I couldn't fill his plate fast enough, other days he barely ate, but he grew and thrived and today is a 21 year old, 5'8", 140 lb. kiddo who can eat half a bag of M&M's and save the rest for another day.
This reminds me of an incident from a few years ago. I was visiting my aunt and went with her to pick up her (normal-size) 2-year-old grandson from daycare. She brought a sippy cup of Sunny Delight (or some similar orange drink, I forget) and a package of Goldfish crackers for him to snack on in the car. When we got home, he wanted more food. I asked her if she wanted me to go cut him up a banana or something, and she said "don't bother, he won't eat it, he hates fruit, I just give him these" and then proceeded to give him TWO PACKAGES of gummy fruit snacks. I went to visit her again last summer and that kid is a fat 5-year-old now.
which is how we know they aren't hungry :). Afternoon snack for the kiddo is an apple (not cut up). If he wants it he'll work at it. If he puts it down after two bites then he's not that hungry.
Adult portions are fed to kids a fraction of the adult weight. Inevitable.
This much.
I went there for the first time a couple of weekends ago. They have a dispenser where you can fill your own custom "pixy sticks" with any of a dozen different flavors.
These aren't normal size ones however... they come in 12", 18" and 38" lengths, all ~5/8" ID tubing. They have the display right at the entrance for kids to gawk it. Basically it's one giant sugar dispenser.