My little guy came home from a playdate yesterday all excited. "We went to the park," he related, "we played on the swings, and then we got a soda."

As the cops say, "Busted".

I don't buy soda for my kids, who were both adopted from Russia, or anything else with sugar or high-fructose corn syrup as a primary ingredient. Yes, before the folks at Archer Daniels Midland get on my case, I know that there have been no concrete links yet between the latter and obesity. But water is just fine as a beverage and there is absolutely no need for an engineered sugar in tomato sauce, ketchup, bread or 99.9% of the other stuff that high-fructose corn syrup gets put into. And no, I'm not getting off my soapbox just yet.

The hyperactivity factor and obesity would have been enough for me to keep my kids off sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. My older son's preschool, run by a Russian émigré, sported a large poster at the entrance entitled "The Evils of Sugar." She had a flat-out ban on sweets, which made birthday celebrations at school a challenge for some parents. And she was even very careful about which kinds of fruits and vegetables she served the kids at mealtimes, believing that some modern varieties, like super-sweet corn and so-called golden pineapples, had been bred with excess sugar.

But about the time that I brought my older son home from Russia in 1999, studies started coming out that linked a craving for sweets with alcoholism. Scientists believe that the relationship is at least partially genetic in nature. I don’t know that the birthparents of either of my sons carried the gene for alcoholism, but excessive consumption of alcohol is a problem in Russia that even its president, Valdimir Putin, has publicly acknowledged. So why would I light that fire?

Some day, genetic tests may allow me to know more about what risks of alcoholism my children may run because of their Russian heritage. Until then, we'll just say, "No Thanks" to sugar.