Pre-schoolers with a taste for fruit juice may pack on excess pounds, but only if they already have a tendency toward being overweight, a new study suggests.
Some past studies have linked children's intake of sugary fruit juice to excess weight gain, but others have failed to find such a relationship.
Despite the question mark, though, experts still generally recommend limiting children's juice drinking; the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) suggests that children ages 1 to 6 drink no more than 4 to 6 ounces of juice per day.
In the new study, published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that the higher a child's juice intake, the greater the gain in body fat over time - but only among children who were initially overweight or on the verge of becoming so at the study's outset. In contrast, children who ate more whole fruits tended to put on less body fat.
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