Why toddlers are hooked on sugar
Leading United States health organisations recently released their first consensus recommendations about what young children should be drinking: only breast milk or, if necessary, infant formula until 6 months old.
Water can be introduced around then, and plain cow’s milk at around their first birthday.
That’s it. No juice, no flavoured or plant-based milks, no caffeinated beverages or sodas.
The good news is, parents of infants seem to be on the right track – breastfeeding is on the rise. But once children get into the toddler zone, it’s pandemonium.
There’s been a boom in unhealthy foods and beverages for children 6 months to 3 years old, packaged for convenience and often promising to make children stronger and smarter.
Dietary supplements said to boost the immune system. Squeezy pouches boasting 3 grams of protein and 3g of fibre. Oven-baked stone-ground wheat ‘‘wafflez’’, superfood puffs and a baffling array of toddler milks purported to aid brain and eye development.
Billy Roberts, senior analyst of food and drink at market research firm Mintel, says that there were four times more product launches in the baby and toddler food aisle last year than in 2005, with a huge surge in new toddler foods and drinks, most of which are extremely high in sugar.
Experts point to several factors driving this surge. Parents are demanding on-the-go packaging. Industry’s lust for market share has driven advertising aimed at parents of toddlers. And new parents often struggle to find nutritional guidance, often gleaning what they can from parenting chat rooms and family lore.
With more dual-income families, convenience has become central to beleaguered parents passing packaged snacks back to hungry and/or bored toddlers in car seats.
For a scientific report for the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, Mary Story, a professor of global health, and family medicine and community health at Duke’s Global Health Institute, and her team found that 29 per cent of toddlers’ calories came from snacks, most of which were salty or sweetened processed foods, not fruits and vegetables.
Jennifer Harris leads a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Connecticut that studies food marketing to children, adolescents and parents, and how it affects diets and health.
She says that toddler snacks are often positioned as healthier than those for adults.
‘‘But we didn’t find that to be the case in terms of added sugar, sodium, saturated fat, and calories.’’
There are bright spots in the baby-toddler nutrition world. Long dominated by the tiny glass jars from major, often multinational companies, entrepreneurs are launching healthier brands in convenient pouches and in the refrigerated aisle of the grocery store.
Rick Klauser, chief executive of vegetable-forward Sprout Foods, says major brands take advantage of US government loopholes that don’t require fanciful nutrition and ingredient labelling on the front of packages to match up with the order of ingredients on the back.
‘‘Consumers are already frustrated. They think they know what they are feeding their babies, but there’s a gap in my mind between what we’re telling people and what we’re feeding them,’’ he said.
Klauser said that cleaning up communication on labels is crucial for toddler food products and that the return on investment will be seen in the reduction of health-care costs.
‘‘By 18 months,’’ he says, ‘‘a child’s nutrition journey is more or less forged.’’