I was in the grocery store yesterday and had some baby food for Aliza among my purchases.  The friendly cashier asked me how old my child ones and we chatted for a little bit.  Then the conversation turned awkward:

Cashier: So your daughter must be drinking juice now too.
Me: Well, actually we aren’t giving her juice, just milk and a little water.
Cashier (obviously a juice fan): Why not?
Me: Juice is really mostly sugar with very little nutritional content, all kids need is milk and a little water.
Cashier (clearly thinking I’m being ridiculous): Oh no, I mean the Gerber juices, for babies.
Me: I know, they’re better than fruit punch, but not by much.
Cashier (wondering why I hate my baby so much): Have you tried them? They’re much less sweet then adult juices.  I’ve tasted them.

At this point I thought about pulling out my trump card (“I’m a pediatrician and you’re wrong!”) but decided that would not be a good way to make friends.  Plus I figured the people waiting behind me in line didn’t want to hear about how juice contributes to babies’ sweet tooth, childhood obesity and bottle caries.  One thing I did find very interesting is how much stronger an objection I got to the idea that juice is bad from this woman than I get from my patients in clinic.  It makes me wonder if they all feel as strongly as she does, and just are not telling me to my face, because I have the stethoscope.

Many of the family’s I see in clinic get nutritional help from Women, Infants, and Children (a great program that supplies food and formula for low-income women from pregnancy to postpartum and for their babies to the age of 5 years).  One source of resistance I often meet to my juice schpeil is that WIC supplies juice, so it must be good for babies.  I brought this up with a WIC nutritionist recently during a site visit, and she reassured me that WIC is currently revising it’s grocery list to include less juice and thus hopefully discourage usage a little more.  Of course, the govenment does not exactly have an A+ record of encouraging good nutrition.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 11:27 am by Rebecca and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.