The 5 Reasons Our Kids Are Overweight

Here's an eye-opener: The CDC found that kids eat more than 150 additional calories every day than they did in 1989.

Here's an eye-opener: The Centers for Disease Control found that kids eat more than 150 additional calories every day than they did in 1989.

Let's run the math on that one. It takes 3,500 calories to create an extra pound of body weight. That means every 20 days, the average American child eats enough extra calories to weigh a pound more than his 1989 contemporary. Over the course of a year, that's enough to add 18 pounds of extra heft to your child's frame.

How can this be? Are children today simply that much more gluttonous? Are parents that much more lax? Did somebody farm out all our new home construction to Hansel and Gretel Architects, Inc.?

Well, consider this: It's not just our kids who are eating vastly more calories. In 1971, the average American male consumed 2,450 calories a day; the average woman, 1,542. But by the year 2000, American men were averaging about 2,618 daily calories (up 7 percent), while women were eating 1,877 calories (a whopping 18 percent increase, or 335 more calories every day!). The real truth of the matter is this: The food that we consume today is simply different from the food that Americans ate 20 or 30 years ago. And the reasons are as simple as they are sneaky:

#1: We've added extra calories to traditional foods. In the early 1970s, food manufacturers, looking for a cheaper ingredient to replace sugar, came up with a substance called high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Today, HFCS is in an unbelievable array of foods — everything from breakfast cereals to bread, from ketchup to pasta sauce, from juice boxes to iced tea. According to the USFDA, the average American consumes 82 grams of added sugars every day, which contribute an empty 317 calories to our diets. HFCS no doubt shares some of the blame; as a cheap by-product with a long shelf life, the food industry is finding all sorts of new foods in which to hide sugar. So Grandma's pasta sauce now comes in a jar, and it's loaded with stuff just perfect for adding meat to your bones — and flab on your belly.

Tip: Once you excise the sugar from your diet, replace it with these 10 best foods you're not eating.

#2: We've been trained to supersize it. It seems like Economics 101: If you can get a lot more food for just a few more cents, then it makes all the sense in the world to upgrade to the "value meal." And because food is so inexpensive for manufacturers to produce on a large scale, your average fast-food emporium makes a hefty profit whenever you supersize your meal — even though you're getting an average of 73 percent more calories for only a 17 percent increase in cost. The problem is the way we look at food — we should be looking at cutting down on our calories, not adding to them. In fact, if we were really smart, fast-food shops would be charging us more for the smaller portions!

Tip: Before you supersize it, tame your raging appetite with these 8 techniques.

#3: We've laced our food with time bombs. A generation ago it was hard for food manufacturers to create baked goods that would last on store shelves. Most baked goods require oils, and oil leaks at room temperature. But since the 1960s, manufacturers have been baking with — and restaurateurs have been frying with — something called trans fats. Trans fats are cheap and effective: They make potato chips crispier and Oreo cookies tastier, and they let fry cooks make pound after pound of fries without smoking up their kitchens. The downside: Trans fats increase your bad cholesterol, lower your good cholesterol, and greatly increase your risk of heart disease.

#4: We're drinking more calories than ever. A study from the University of North Carolina found that we consume 450 calories a day from beverages, nearly twice as many as 30 years ago. This increase amounts to an extra 23 pounds a year that we're forced to work off — or carry around with us. Many of the calories come from HFCS in our drinks — especially, when it comes to kids, in our "fruit" drinks that are often nothing more than water, food coloring, and sweetener. In fact, anything you have for your kids to drink in your fridge right now — unless it's water, milk, or diet soda — probably has HFCS in it. Go ahead — read the label.

#5: We don't know what's in our food. More and more, marketers are adding new types of preservatives, fats, sugars, and other "new" food substances to our daily meals. But often, they go unexplained (what is "xanthan gum" anyway?) or, in the case of restaurant food, unmentioned. Unless we're eating it right off the tree, it's hard to know what, exactly, is in that fruity dish.