U.S. DIET GUIDELINES URGE CUTS IN SUGAR

Parents now have an extra reason to say no to candy, cake and ice cream for young children. The first U.S. government dietary guidelines for infants and toddlers, released Tuesday, recommend feeding only breast milk for at least six months and no added sugar for children under age 2.

“It’s never too early to start,” said Barbara Schneeman, a nutritionist at University of California Davis. “You have to make every bite count in those early years.”

The guidelines stop short of two key recommendations from scientists advising the government. Those advisers said in July that everyone should limit their added sugar intake to less than 6 percent of calories and men should limit alcohol to one drink per day.

Instead, the guidelines stick with previous advice: limit added sugar to less than 10 percent of calories per day after age 2. And men should limit alcohol to no more than two drinks per day, twice as much as advised for women.

“I don’t think we’re finished with alcohol,” said Schneeman, who chaired a committee advising the government on the guidelines. “There’s more we need to learn.”

The new guidelines acknowledge that added sugars are nutritionally empty calories that can add extra pounds, and concede that emerging evidence links alcohol to certain cancers and some forms of cardiovascular disease — a retreat from the once popular notion that moderate drinking is beneficial to health.

But officials at the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services rejected explicit caps on sugar and alcohol consumption.

The dietary guidelines are issued every five years by the Agriculture Department and the Department of Health and Human Services. The government uses them to set standards for school lunches and other programs.