In addition to soft drinks, children are also consuming large amounts of juices, juice drinks and sports drinks. Although juices can provide nutrients such as vitamin C, they are also quite high in calories. An eight-ounce glass of orange juice has 110 calories and provides 150 percent of the day's vitamin C requirement. Some juices are also fortified with calcium and are beneficial to children who can't consume milk. Many individually packaged bottles of juice however, contain 16 to 20 ounces, increasing calories to over 250 per bottle.
Some fruit drinks are only partly fruit juice.
All of these juice drinks are primarily high fructose corn syrup, a sugar. Most of these drinks come in 20-ounce bottles, providing some 300 calories. For many of our children, drinking these beverages on a daily basis can easily account for half their caloric needs before they have eaten one bit of solid food. Calories in liquids don't dull the appetite as much as calories in solid foods. He found that people compensate for solids, but not liquids.