Children like to have lots of cool drinks during these warm summer days, but how do the various fruit juices shape up in terms of being a truly healthy option?

Hot weather, thirsty kids - and that could mean fat kids too. Let them drink too many fizzy drinks and by this time next year they could be little barrels. A recent study in a medical magazine claimed that just one extra fizzy drink a day could result in a child putting on an extra stone in a year.

The Government, meanwhile, is also concerning itself with the health of our children. (It might have thought of that before it sold off many school playing fields, of course, but that's another soapbox) and is banning fizzy drinks and chocolates from school vending machines.

And if you're wondering why schools are selling fizzy drinks in the first place, well, the soft drinks industry makes £45m a year from school vending machines and each school makes an average of £2,500.

So the vending machines aren't going, but manufacturers are trying hard to find something acceptable to sell in them.

There are, as yet, no clear cut guidelines as to which drinks will be permitted in school as it's not as straightforward as it might seem.

Fruit juices are good. Yet fruit juices contain a lot of natural sugar. So too much is not good.

The best drink of all is water. But if you've never encouraged your child to drink water - or drunk much of it yourself - it could be a long slow battle to change, especially if your tap water, like ours, tastes strongly of chlorine.

The best compromise is a mixture of fruit juice and water with no added sugar or any other additives. All sorts of combinations of drinks are now appearing in a bid to beat the school ban - individually, and expensively, packaged in small bottles, usually 200ml, designed for a lunch box.

They all look healthy enough, proclaiming their naturalness or fruitness in big letters. But most are very sweet. Some contain sugar, others contain artificial sweeteners. Whether they add calories or not, both these encourage sweet tastes which means it's going to take even longer to get children to appreciate the purity of water or the sharpness of natural fruit.

OUR FAVOURITE:

TROPICANA GO!: 70 per cent fruit juice, 30 per cent water. A good compromise. You can't drink gallons of it - it has 40 calories per 100ml, but it's refreshing and sharp with a good natural flavour and should encourage children to enjoy natural tastes.

SWEET TREATS:

BUXTON STRAWBERRY FLAVOUR: 91 per cent mineral water with added sugar and flavouring. The strawberry version had a slightly strange taste and was quite sweet, but not excessively so. Small print on the bottles says to enjoy it as a treat - and the rest of the time drink Buxton natural mineral water.

SAINSBURYS KIDS: Apple and Blackcurrant. 17 per cent fruit juice, flavourings and artificial sweeteners. Nicely fruity. Would be even nicer if it wasn't quite so sweet.

VOLVIC BLAST: Mineral water with flavourings, preservatives, sweeteners, but not too strongly flavoured and not too sickly sweet.

YAZOO: Low fat milk flavoured and with added sugar. Comparatively high in calories so needs to be a rationed treat, but a useful way of getting calcium inside your kids.

STRONG AND SWEET:

These are drinks made with a basis of fruit juice, but boosted with sweeteners and flavourings.

ASDA JUICE SQUEEZE/MORRISONS JUICE BLAST: 15 per cent fruit juices, which give it a tang. Lots of sweeteners so it's very sweet, but just this side of sickly.

RIBENA: Six per cent blackcurrant juice; 12 per cent sugars. Bursting with blackcurrants? Well, not quite...

RIBENA LIGHT: Seven per cent fruit juice, sweeteners, flavouring.

TESCO BLACKCURRANT: Ten per cent blackcurrant juice plus sweeteners, flavours and colours.

FIVE ALIVE BERRY BLAST: 20 per cent fruit juice, sweeteners, flavourings.

CAPRI SUN: Ten per cent fruit juice. More than ten per cent sugar.

SICKLY SYRUPY SWEET:

On the surface, these seem brilliant - mineral water with a little fruit juice. Perfect thirst-quenching drink. Unfortunately, they also add what seems like bucketloads of artificial sweeteners, pandering to children's love of all things sweet and turning the drink into a sickly syrup.

DISNEY WELSH NATURAL WATER: Well, yes, this is made with natural water, but they do their best to turn it into unnatural water with flavourings, preservatives and sweeteners.

MARKS & SPENCER: sparkling water with fruit flavour carbonated mineral water with apple juice preservative e, flavourings, sweetener - like drinking a lollipop.

ROBINSONS FRUIT SHOOT H2O: 99.4 per cent spring water with flavourings and sweeteners. The apple flavour was very strong and sweet. A bit less flavouring and sweetener and this could have been a decent drink

PANDA SPRING banana and strawberry: A truly strange and disgusting taste. The fruit juice content is actually grape and lemon, the flavourings come from elsewhere.

SUNNY D: Boasts it's been reinvented, but it still has only 15 per cent fruit. No added sugar, but the list of added ingredients is very long and includes sweeteners, preservatives and gum. And why is Sunny D kept in the chill section of supermarkets? There is absolutely no need for it to be chilled before opening.

HAPPY HIPPO: No fruit juice, but flavoured spring water with sweetener. Sickly sweet. "Great for small children " it says on the bottle. No it's not - it'll ruin their taste buds.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: It's a tricky one. Many of the more "natural" drinks are high in calories. But many of the low calorie drinks are made sickly sweet by artificial sweeteners - which in the long run will only get your child more used to sweet foods and feed a lifetime of sweet cravings, so doing them no favours.

The real answer is water, pure and simple. Failing that, try diluting water with a dollop of fruit juice. Then gradually reduce the dollop to a dash. Put it in some fancy water bottle with enough street cred to get them through the day.

And, above all, set a good example. For if your children don't see you drinking a lot of water, how can you convince them it's a good thing?