[jackfraser]

This is typical woke-capitalist garbage.

Real juice is just fine to drink - in moderation! Before getting some exercise, it's a great boost, has vitamins, easy energy, and it's an excellent bribe. It's also trivial to get juiceboxes that have extremely simple ingredient lists so you can be reasonably sure you're not going to be feeding your kid anything that kids haven't been consuming for millenia.

Should kids have it every day? No, probably not! They need to be used to drinking water as their fundamental beverage. "Fruity water" as a replacement for normal water simply inculcates them with the idea that plain water is gross and not good enough, and that they should demand some enhanced alternative. It does nothing to stem the habit-based dietary issues people end up with - after all, if you're used to fruity water and the only available options are juiceboxes and water, there's no way you'll be satisfied with the latter.

Increasingly it looks like there's a push to serve our kids things even less organic than we used to. Beyond Meat or maggot burgers, fruity water, it's like there's a war on normal, real products. Why are we assuming these new untested alternatives are somehow better or, at least, not fraught with most of the failure modes of their predecessors?