A new study of America's woefully inadequate parents finds that many of you have mistaken beliefs about nutrition that will—in all likelihood—one day kill your kids. Allow us to help you with a useful public health guideline.

USA Today reports on a new study published by researchers at the University of Connecticut that quantifies just how little you, America's parents, understand about how to raise your very own children. Jesus. Do your innocent children even stand a chance?

The vast majority of parents give kids sugary drinks regularly. Some 96% of parents say they gave sugary drinks to their kids in the month prior to the survey. The most common sugary drinks that parents give kids are fruit drinks — given by 77% of parents in the past month, the survey found. Some 80% of parents of children age 2 to 5 provided fruit drinks, such as Capri Sun or Sunny D.

Equally significant, nearly half of parents surveyed rated flavored waters as healthy, and more than one-quarter considered fruit drinks and sports drinks to be healthy.

Not only are you, the Sugar Baron parents of America, feeding your children beverages that will almost certainly cause them to become diabetic amputees at some point in their brief lives, but you are doing so under the mistaken impression that many of these sugar water concoctions are healthy.

They are not. They are water saturated with sugar. Most everything in the soda aisle is sugar water. Most everything in the "fruit juice" aisle is sugar water. Most everything in the "sports drink" aisle is sugar water. In addition to your many other inadequacies as a parent, you seem to be constitutionally unable to prevent your child from ingesting mountainous quantities of sugar. In order to protect your children from a horrible medical fate—and in order to assuage the future guilt you are doomed to carry over your nutritional death sentence—we, the scientists of Gawker.com, have prepared this guide to liquid nutrition for all American parents. Study it. Memorize it. Make it a part of your family's daily lives.

WHAT SHOULD YOUR CHILDREN DRINK?

  • Water

-Ends-

Make no deviations from this list until further notice.

[Photo: Flickr]