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Over the half term I’ve visited my favourite coffee shop a few times with my daughter. We love the Pumpkin Spice Latte. As a treat we sit and consume our tasty beverage. Unaware until now – that this particualar treat is holding a nasty Halloween trick.

The sugar content of these seasonal favourites is astonishing. Due to a lactose intolerance – I choose oatmilk. With a whopping 66g of sugar and over 500 calories. Its not just the caffeine giving me and my daughter a kick!

That is double the RDA of sugar and similar calories to a Big Mac! I’ll need to run for about an hour to burn that type of fuel.

All the high street coffee shops and fast food establishments have similar offerings.

Clear labelling

I’m not calling for a ban – just clear labelling to make consumers aware and enable an informed choice. I would hope most responsible parents wouldn’t intentionally poor the equivalent of 16 teaspoons of sugar down their childs throat.

The sugar content in these drinks represent such a large percentage of a childs daily intake.

Not only is this a concern in the battle against childhood obesity, it also raises concern for tooth decay.

We all need to play our part in educating our children about sugar content and consumption. The government also legislate for an overall reduction in sugar consumption.

With one in three primary school leavers being overweight, officials demanded makers of popular sweet foods cut amounts in ten major food categories.

Too much sugar

Alison Tedstone, chief nutritionist at Public Health England said:

“Too much sugar is bad for our health and most of us are consuming more than we need, often without realising it. We’ve continued to see some progress in reducing sugar in a number of everyday food and drink products and this shows that success is possible through reformulation.

Yet overall progress remains too slow. Faster and more robust action is needed to help us consume less sugar, which will help us become healthier and lower the economic burden of obesity and preventable pressure on the NHS.”

Envisage Dental TV is a waiting room digital information system helping you to educate your clients on this and many more topics.