Once school starts, many factors contribute to the colds and flus that often contribute to our children missing school: being exposed to lots of germs, lack of fresh air and sunshine, and the stresses that go along with school are just a few. One often-overlooked factor is the amount of sugar in our children's diets. Since sugar suppresses our immune systems, it is the last thing you want to give your sick child, and limiting it for your healthy child wil help keep his or her immune system working more effectively.

Sugar also sabotages your child's health and happiness by contributing to reduced learning capacity, drowsiness and decreased activity, learning disorders, eczema, depression, worsening symptoms of ADHD, and it plays a factor in heart disease and cancer.

Sugar sneaks into your child's diet in many different forms. Food makers often use several types of sugar so that it appears on the ingredient list under different names in hopes that you won't recognize it.

Here are some of the names sugar hides behind:

- sucrose

- corn syrup

- high fructose corn syrup

- corn syrup solids

- cane-juice crystals

- caramel

- carob syrup

- beet sugar

- brown sugar

- turbinado sugar

- invert sugar

- confectioner's sugar

- powdered sugar

- honey

- molasses

- buttered syrup

- levulose or fructose

- dextrose

- glucose

- lactose

- maltose

- sorbitol

- mannitol

- malitol

- xylitol

- and many more.

To find out just how much sugar your child is consuming daily, try this activity with him or her. Pick out 2-3 of your child's favorite packaged foods and drinks. Have a box of sugar packets and tape on hand. Look at the top of the Nutrition Facts section to see what a serving size is. For example, a 20-ounce bottle of pop is actualy considered two and a half servings, or a serving of cookies is two cookies, even though we may eat four or five. Once you and your child have determined what the serving size is, look to see how many grams of sugar are in each serving. Divide that number by four and that is how many sugar packets you tape to the package.

For example, if a beverage has 16 grams of sugar per serving, then tape four packets of sugar to the package. That is how much sugar you are getting when you drink that product.

Talk with your child to determine if he or she normally eats or drinks more than the serving size and figure out how much sugar he or she is actually taking in. See if you can figure out how much sugar each of you might get at a whole meal or in one day's worth of meals or snacks. Make a long chain of sugar packets to realy see how much sugar that is. You'll be amazed at the amount of sugar your child is consuming and can open the conversation about how all that sugar affects his or her health. Be willing to look at your own sugar intake too!