Five-year-olds are eating four times their daily sugar limit

CHILDREN aged five are gorging on sugar by eating four times the recommended limit, research has revealed.

A study of English schoolchildren found them to be consuming an average 75g of sugar a day – around 19 teaspoons.

This is four times the 19g maximum daily intake advised for their age group.

Sweet drinks, including cans of pop, fruit juice and smoothies, account for 40 per cent of the daily tally, making them a much bigger source of sugar than cakes, sweets or chocolate.

Researcher Peymane Adab, professor of public health at Birmingham University, said that weight for weight, the sugar in fruit juice and smoothies is potentially just as bad for the body as that in soft drinks, and it is wrong to assume they are healthy, just because they contain fruit.

The study presented at the European Obesity Summit in Gothenburg, Sweden, comes amid growing concern about the damage sugar is doing to health.

Researchers from Birmingham and Leeds universities asked the parents of more than 1,000 five and six-year-olds what their children had eaten in the previous 24 hours.

They then calculated how much ‘free sugar’ was in each item.

The term covers all added sugar, as well as sugar in honey and syrups.

It doesn’t include the sugar in whole pieces of fruit but does include fruit juice.

This is because once fruit is juiced, the sugar is released from the cells and acts on the body in the same way as the sugar in fizzy drinks. The average daily sugar intake was 74.6g – and sugar made up 18 per cent of the typical child’s calories.

Professor Adab and colleague Kiya Hurley said that although the children studied were in the West Midlands, there is no reason to believe the figures aren’t typical of the UK as a whole. Professor Adab also cautioned that it isn’t clear how effective the planned sugar tax on soft drinks will be.