[Nyororin]

Originally Posted by edelweiss

From what I understand from your posting here I would assume that you take extra health precautions with your child. You are well informed and cautious. You also have a child with different needs. Not knowing anything else about the OP I can't say the same thing.

Other than paying attention to the artificial sweeteners thing - which started mainly because I have a severe allergic reaction to one of the common ones - I don`t think I do anything all that much differently than the average parent in Japan. And I was talking about the average parent here. You just don`t get the levels of prepackaged foods as in the US - they simply don`t exist.
What I am trying to say is that you are pointing out food companies and their ingredients... but in reality, most people make their own food from raw ingredients so this isn`t the issue you see it as. You would be VERY hard pressed to find a parent who was feeding their kid any amount of prepackaged food. The parents who don`t really care just make whatever and feed it to their kids without thinking about balance or nutrition - but the raw ingredients thing is pretty much true even then.

I think it is really hard to try to grasp this if you`ve lived in the US your entire life as the food culture really is different. There are no TV dinners. There are very few of the "time saving" prepackaged foods, and those that do exist tend to be of the freshly made deli style. Artificial colors are generally pretty sparse, particularly in things for children.
Home cooked meals (from raw ingredients, not packaged things) are the norm for families, and eating out comes after - fast food as anything other than an occasional thing is pretty much unthinkable.
You can make poor choices in balance and nutrition with a home cooked meal but it is very hard to load it with chemicals, processed fats, sugars, etc, like you find in processed foods.
I have been to Korea and to China, and things struck me as being the same in those countries - food is mostly freshly cooked from raw ingredients.

Just checking, but nobody here is actually saying that they would prefer to give a kid a sports drink rather than water in normal circumstances?

Of course not. But you started against it because of "more chemicals" - which is what I was commenting on.