Teaching Kids about Nutrition with Oasis Juice

*I received samples of the products but all opinions are my own*

Daniel (7) ran to the pantry and picked up the Oasis Fruit and Veggie Plus juice. He sat down and studied the nutritional label on it. “No sugar added,” he read. “YES!” This is my favourite juice!

I think school has been good for something!

All of this got me to thinking about nutrition, and wondering if the kids really did understand what they were drinking and eating and what was really healthy for them.

My kids are juice fanatics. Say what you will, but my kids drink a lot of juice. That’s why I want to make sure that the juice they do drink it good for them. I only buy Oasis juice because of these three things:

• OASIS = 100% juice
• No ( NEVER ) sugar added. The only sugar in the juice is naturally occurring from the fruit.
• 1 portion ( 250ml ) of 100% juice = 2 servings of fruit by the Canadian Food Guide.

Wanting to learn more and teach my kids about nutrition, I approached the Lassonde juice factory across the street from my parent’s house to ask them if I could do some juice activities with my kids.

Growing up near the juice plant where they made apple juice was always exciting – the smell of apples, the big trucks, the activity. I have vivid memories of going for a class trip to the juice plant (occupational health and safety prevents that these days), but we got to see juice making in action and I got to see my first forklift. I’ve always had a fascination with juice!

Armed with a cooler full of juice, the kids and I set out to do some learning!

Here are a few activities for you to try at home, too! These activities are most appropriate for kids aged 7 and older.

1. Sugar Content: Just how much sugar is in our favourite drinks?
We lay out containers of some of our favourite drinks and looked up the sugar content.

According to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian eats about 23 teaspoons (92 grams) of added sugar each day from a combination of packaged and prepared foods. That’s a lot of sugar, considering that the Dietary Reference Intakes suggest we consume no more than 12 teaspoons (48 grams) of added sugar in a 2,200 calorie diet.

Sugar naturally occurs in fruit, vegetables and milk, but these are not considered “added” sugars and are not part of the 12-teaspoon (48 grams) daily maximum. These foods provide lots of vitamins and minerals and are important for our diet.

We measured the sugar in each drink per 1 cup and put it in front of the beverage container.
15g sugar = 1Tbsp

Wine: ½ tsp
Five Alive: 2Tbsp
Guinness: 0
Coke: 2Tbsp
Big 8 Pop: 1 ½ Tbsp
Milk: ½ Tbsp

That’s a lot of unnecessary sugar to consume! (maybe that’s an excuse to stick to the wine and beer!)

This is a really good visual for kids to really understand the concept!

2. Testing using the Five Senses:

Lay out glasses with a different juice in each one. Create a chart to record your data.

I quickly made one on a piece of paper, but have also included a taste-testing form to use with kids who are a bit older as it requires writing sentences.

Take one of the glasses of juice in your hand. Ask the children to give you a word (or to write in their chart) to describe the juice in terms of sight, smell, feel and taste.

This is also a good chance to learn some science vocabulary words like “translucent” and “opaque”.

3. Taste Testing:
We wanted to do some more taste testing, but this time to see how smell and sight played a role.
Set out a row of different flavours of Oasis juice. Then, blindfold the child and ask him to tell which juice he is drinking. We also tried plugging our noses while blindfolded to see if it masked the taste. This led to a great discussion about how our sense of smell helps us know the taste of something – and how that is thrown off when we have a cold!

We kept a tally chart of how many times we guessed properly. When we plugged our noses, we did get a few of the tests wrong!

4. Reading Nutrition Labels:
As I said in the beginning, my son is really interested in nutrition labels on products.
We arranged all the various kinds of Oasis Juice bottles we had on the table to examine the nutrition labels. For comparison, I also bought a bottle of the most sugar-loaded, artificial juice I could find.

We talked about
– How in Canada labels must be in English and French
– How the list of ingredients is written in order. The first listed is the most used ingredient, then in descending order. When you look at the “sugar juice”, the first ingredient is water, followed by sugar. Oasis lists fruit as the first several ingredients!

5: Learning about Calories
For active boys their age, they should consume 1800 calories daily.

We used the fruit punch, Oasis juice and an Oasis Low-Calorie Juice for this activity. We broke each juice down and asked these questions:
How many calories in each cup?
If they can have 1800 calories a day, how many cups of juice (and nothing else) could they have in a day?
How many grams of sugar are in one cup?
What other vitamins and minerals are listed?

The comparisons were really interesting! I have noticed my oldest son looking at nutrition labels a lot more now!

Overall:
The boys learned a lot about nutrition and making good choices during these activities. They have become more aware, and understand why we won’t let them drink or eat certain high-processed products. (Try looking up the sodium content with your kids on the McDonalds’ website!)

Thank you to Oasis for this great learning experience! Along with the juice, the boys received some fun goodies, including these crazy hats, which they wore to school for crazy hair day!
I am more convinced than ever that this is the best type of juice for my kids!

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