Easy on booze, and no sweets for tots — feds

Tots under 2 shouldn’t eat sweets, new federal guidelines advised Tuesday.

While the guidelines warned against serving foods with added sugar — including cake, cookies and ice cream — to kids younger than 2, advice on sugar and booze intake for adults remained the same: Sugar intake should be under 10% of adult diets and men should keep to two alcoholic drinks a day, women just one.

The guidelines, released by the Agriculture Department and the Department of Health and Human Services in a dense 164-page document, play a quiet but notable role in American diets, factoring into school lunch standards and food stamp blueprints and influencing the food industry.

The government updates the guidelines once every five years. This year’s report marks the first time the guidance has included advice for children under 2.

“Early food preferences influence food and beverage choices later,” Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary, and Alex Azar, the Health and Human Services secretary, said in a joint message. “And the science has evolved to focus on the importance of a healthy dietary pattern over time.”

But Dr. Marion Nestle, a professor emerita at New York University who studies nutrition, was disappointed the guidelines for adults snubbed stricter limits suggested by a committee of advisers earlier this year.

“They didn’t pay attention to what the scientific advisory said,” Nestle told the Daily News, adding that the document failed to meet the challenges of the pandemic, which include rising food insecurity. “It’s out of date before it even gets published.”