There’s an early spring chill hanging over the school drop-off. Mountain Equipment Co-op Mom and Lululemon Mom furrow their brows and bounce their babies.

“I can’t believe Alex’s mom had the nerve to serve Olivia juice!” hisses Lululemon Mom. “It’s bad enough they hand out cartons of chocolate milk at school — 26 grams of sugar! But pushing juice on my daughter in their home?”

“Wow, juice?” I interject, trying to lighten the mood. “Quick! Someone call children’s services!”

If the two moms hadn’t been restrained by their Snuglis and napping progeny, I would have been crushed like a discount can of cola. Perhaps my sarcasm had no place in the schoolyard, but this less-than-sweet exchange had me wondering: Since when did sugar become as fraught as Mideast policy, or Stephen Harper’s casual wear? And since when did juice, or a trifling 26 grams of sugar in chocolate milk, cause such a fuss?

After some hapless calculation, I soon discover it might have something to do with the fact that the 26 grams of white stuff in that tiny brown carton translate into almost seven teaspoons of sugar. Holy modified maltodextrose!

Could I be that blind about the sugar my kids eat? I’ve always maintained a pop-free home and diluted juice on the occasions they do have it. But my eyes are slowly widening to the sucrose superhighway roaring through the foods marketed to my children.

Maybe it’s that flat of juice boxes in our basement. Or perhaps it was the recent pleas of the World Health Organization (WHO) and American Heart Association: To combat the global obesity epidemic, they recommend keeping the added sugars in a kid’s diet (the ones that don’t exist in foods naturally) to less than seven to 11 teaspoons a day. But what hardens my conviction most is the primal lust with which my four-year-old brushes aside the french fries on her plate to lick off every molecule of syrupy ketchup (twice as much sugar per teaspoon as the chocolate milk).

Whatever it was, my mission is clear: I have to take my kids’ overburdened pancreases into my own hands (not literally). I am going to track every gram of sugar my kids consume, and try to rehabilitate them down to the recommended limit, from breakfast to bedtime snacks, even if it kills me.