Overview

Do you know how much sugar is in your drink? A Rethink Your Drink campaign is a great way to teach kids about the amount of sugar that can be found in commonly consumed beverages, as well as their impact on health. Encouraging kids to rethink their drink challenges them to make healthy beverage choices and consume more water.

Take Action

At School

• Host a Hidden Sugars Demonstration to provide a visual representation of the amount of sugar in popular sweetened beverages using sugar cubes, sugar packets or teaspoons of sugar.
• Use a stoplight image to teach kids about drinks they should drink rarely (red), occasionally (yellow), and plenty (green).
• Teach children to read the ingredients on food labels to identify common high-calorie sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup, fruit juice concentrates, dextrose, fructose and sucrose.
• Allow children to bring a water bottle to class to stay hydrate throughout the day.
• Host a taste test with water infused with lemons, limes, berries, cucumbers, mint leaves or other natural flavors.
• Post educational signs near the staff lounge, main office, cafeteria and vending machines to help children, staff and visitors identify the healthiest beverage options.
• Install a water bottle filling station at your school to offer free, cold, filtered water to students and staff.
• Explain the importance of water to children. Adjust your explanation based on the age of the child. Here’s some basic information:
  • • Water is an essential nutrient for life—we can’t live without it!
    • Water represents about two-thirds of our body weight.
    • Water is part of every living cell, and it’s a medium for all metabolic changes (digestion, absorption and excretion), as it helps transport nutrients.

At Home

• Create and post signs around the house about drinking water
• Limit purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages. Think of unsweetened tea and water. 
• Host a water drinking challenge that aims at consuming the appropriate amounts of water daily 
• Try healthy ways to flavor water: infuse with fruit, herbs and other flavorful options.
• Bring your water bottle with you…. Everywhere! Make your water bottle an essential part of your daily life in everything you do. 
• Do a family think-tank activity to brainstorm creative ways to increase water consumption 
• Purcahse a fun, new water bottle that gets children excited about consuming water

Social Emotional Health Highlights

Activities such as these help students explore…

Self-Awareness and Responsible Decision Making:  Children may be able to recognize the overconsumption of sugary drinks as a problem, but they may not see how it affects them personally. For children to develop healthy habits they have to learn how to identify problems, analyze solutions, and reflect on choices. A rethink your drink campaign can teach children the skills they need to make positive decisions for their own health, helping them to develop further self-confidence and self-efficacy. Increasing children’s self-awareness helps them to better recognize how our bodies feel when we are dehydrated or consume too much sugar.

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