The first question is: (a) what was your favourite drink when you were a child?
The choices might include Corona pop ("Every bubble's passed its FIZZical!"), Slush Puppies, cream soda, dandelion and burdock, cherryade, anything from a Sodastream, lager and lime, Tizer, Vimto or tap water.
Now consider this second question: (b) which drink from the above were you most likely to be given by your parents, particularly at meal times?
I don't know you and I know even less about your individual family circumstances. However, as a reader of The Birmingham Post I guess there is a reasonable probability that childhood, proper childhood, real "jumpers for goalposts" childhood, coincided with the period very roughly between 1945 and 1983. I stand to be corrected by the marketing department, who are paid to know about these things, but I think I am somewhere near the right ballpark.
That being the case, I am pretty confident your answer to question (a) will have a direct correlation to your answer to question (b); the correlation being that (a) never = (b).
Because as much as you loved glugging down Corona orangeade - with 10p refundable on return of the bottle - children tended to get given water.
Water with everything. Pop was served only on high days and holidays whereas water, which was always lukewarm, even when freshly drawn, was the cocktail of choice for British kids.
The concept of "that soooo unfair" had not yet been born and if mum and dad said you were having water, you were having water. There was none of this fannying around with choice and we as a nation, both morally and physically, were better for it.
Today, of course, parents pander to the whims of their offspring, serving them a diet of crud, typified by ready-prepared meals, in the hope of avoiding conflict and saving time in their oh-so-busy lives. "I just haven't got time to cook a meal in the evening. And in any case, Philip doesn't like vegetables. He's happy with nuggets . . ."
This culture of cop-out parenting produced one of the great non-story health stories of the past few days when it was revealed middle-class children eat as much junk as poor children. An investigation by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) found the diets of Tamsins and Thomases were virtually interchangeable in nutritional terms with those of Traceys and Tegans.
The findings of the Low Income Nutrition and Diet survey suggest children across the social spectrum, from sink estates to gated estates, aren't being given sufficient fibre, fruit and vegetables and are being overloaded with saturated fat.
Why anyone should think this is surprising is in itself surprising. Economic wealth has no impact on a family's ability to eat healthily or otherwise in this country. We do not live in an impoverished nation and notions of child poverty have been vastly inflated to serve the spurious ends of some charity campaigns.
The simple fact is that many parents feed their children rubbish not out of financial necessity but because they are thick. Relative wealth is irrelevant.
The suggestion from the FSA that food labelling should be made clearer, thereby enabling parents to make healthy choices, is nonsense and would be a complete waste of time. Which is healthier: a banana or a chocolate cream doughnut? It's not rocket science.
Parents could start fighting child obesity, and obviating the need for daft surveys, by ignoring the obscene fizzy drinks aisles in supermarkets. If their children refuse to drink water, so be it. They'll soon come round.