The convenience of a juice box is great for parents and kids, but the sugar is out of control! In this episode of Gear Daddy, Daddy Troy breaks down the sugar content of fruit juice and gives some great tips on how to make beverages more healthy. But here's an ever better parenting idea! How about just serving your children pure water during snack time? It's great for health and nutrition and is a great beverage alternative for you kid. DadLabs Ep. 336 Gear Daddy. Brought to by Boon.

Daddy Troy: Welcome back to Gear Daddy I’m your host Daddy Troy. This whole week at Dad Labs, we’ve been talking about snacks. Today specifically we are going to talk about drinks at snack time, and our whole week has been sponsored by Boon - innovations for modern parents, and we are giving away a whole bunch of Boon shwag at the end of the episode so stick around.

You can’t beat the convenience of juice boxes. Little hands can hold them; well you can freeze them ahead of time. They travel easily, and if all goes right the kid will actually throw them in the trash when he or she is done so you don’t have to. But there are some serious drawbacks, first being these straws end up going everywhere and you will lose them. Secondly kids squirt them on themselves accidentally, but the biggest draw back of all is the amount of sugar in these things.

This particular juice box right here has 26 grams of sugar check it out - that is 6 and a half sugar cubes. The same size serving in this can of cola has 6 sugar cubes that is incredible. So I have a solution for you guess what the solution is? Juice boxes right! The solution is that this juice box right here Mott’s, has reduced the amount of sugar in this particular juice box - it only has 13 grams. And as you can see that is about half the amount of sugar that you would find in that first juice box we looked at.

This particular bag of juice right here which is more like flavored water, has only 2 grams of sugar, and if you want to bag all the sugar, go with a juice box that has no juice in it. This is simply flavored water – zero calories, zero grams of sugar – just flavored water. Now, if you don’t want to buy these small packages and you’re a little bit worried about filling up the landfill – that all this stuff is not recyclable, you can buy larger containers of your own juice and possibly water it down on your own.

It may taste a little weird to you at first if you’ve never had watered down juice, but kids get used to it really, really, quickly. Now one of my biggest suggestions though, is to get rid of all this store bought stuff completely. Just get it out of the way and instead, do something with your kids to make your own juice. Go to the store, buy some produce with your kid, have him or her pick it out and get one of these juicers.

Now you’ve got to be careful with little hands – my kid loves running this juicer. And we go out and make our own juice, add our own amount of sugar and it’s a product that he or she has created and then they have their own investment. But I have my best solution of all for drinks at snack time, and that is – simply go with water.

My kid’s school is a no juice school – they don’t allow juice on the playground or in the classrooms. Instead, what they do is they sit out a tray just like this – every kid’s cup is out there with a name on it, and they have a cooler full of water and what they do is, kids self select when they want to go and drink - they know when they’re thirsty. Now of course, you’ve got to keep an eye on them to make sure they’re not overheating or anything, but the kids get used to taking control of their own destiny.

Now I know some of you have been worried – we did a piece about BPA plastics, and some of you had been worried about plastics and your kids drinking plastic, so I’ve got another solution there. But first, you know, people like Boon are actually paying attention to that right now – this sippy cup by Boon is BPA free, its PVC free, so people are really starting to pay attention to that, but if you want to go the whole glass route, I got these glasses from Ikea – they’re really, really strong and in the past 6 months, my kid’s been using this glass, he’s only broken one of them in the past 6 months. And my little daughter, who’s really young, really loves her cute little glass that she gets to drink out of.

Well that’s all this week for Gear Daddy. Remember this whole week has been sponsored by Boon – Innovations for modern parents and we’re giving away a bunch of Boon stuff, so go to dadlabs.com – upper right hand part of the screen, click on Dad Labs crib. If you register there, you’re automatically registered for the Boon giveaway.

Also, if you’re interested in juice boxes, don’t forget to go to dadlabs.com and look for the juice box taste test that Daddy Brad and Daddy Clay did – its really, really funny. We’ll see you next week on Gear Daddy and all week long on dadlabs.com.