Is Baby Food Fit for Babies?

Lacking criticism and judgement in your life?

No looks of scorn and disapproval?

You can easily solve this problem by having a baby. (Or, if you don’t want such a dramatic change in your life just for the sake of being socially judged, borrow a baby — preferably with the parents’ knowledge and approval.)

Confused?

All the parents out there completely understand what I’m talking about. You can chain smoke, eat a 1 million calorie super bacon PopTart burger while wearing Lady Gaga’s newest outfit and playing the bagpipes, and still get fewer looks of disdain than if you’re carrying a baby seemingly underdressed for 35°C (95°F) weather with humidity hovering around 95% or are trying to corral a screaming toddler at Funorama.

I guess this makes sense for the survival of the species, but as a society, are we worried about the wrong things?

The kids aren’t all right

Adults in industrialized countries are getting more and more obese, but so are children.

How bad is it?

• In Canada in 1979, only 3% of children between 2-17 years old were obese. By 2004, 8% of children were obese and 18% were overweight in Canada.
• In the United States, between the late 1970s and 2007/8:
  • Among children 2-5 years of age, obesity increased from 5 to 10.4%.
  • Among 6-11 year olds, obesity increased from 6.5 to 19.6%.
  • Among adolescents aged 12-19, obesity increased from 5 to 18.1%.

And overweight kids are getting relatively larger. A child over his or her ideal weight/size is more likely to be really heavy — not just carrying a little “baby fat”.

Baby food: Is it fit for babies?

Many regulations control the food we eat as adults. So you’d think that food for babies would also be strictly controlled and covered by more nutritionally stringent rules. Nope. Baby and toddler food is filled with excess salt and sugar, with new fun foods targeting toddlers.

There are regulations, but they have pretty big loopholes. For instance, in Canada the Food and Drug Regulations Section B.25.003 says that “no person shall sell infant food that contains a) strained fruit, b) fruit juice, c) fruit drink or d) cereal, if sodium chloride has been added to the food”.

Well, that sounds good. No salt can be added to strained fruit, fruit juice, fruit drink or cereal! (Not sure why you’d want salt on your apples anyway.) But here’s the loop-hole: you can add salt to other foods like snack foods and vegetable-based dinners, where it would make them more gastronomically stimulating.

Fun food

While deep-fried fish-shaped fish sticks may be fun foods, why doesn’t anybody ask the most important question – What type of fish is in this? Sorry folks, but “fish” is not an ingredient in the same way “mammal” is not an ingredient. Yes, waiter, I would like to order the mammal dish and could you make it in the shape of a cow?

How did this all start? Around the same time as the cotton ginny was invented, during the Industrial Revolution, baby food (mostly formula) became commercialized. By 1928, Daniel Gerber expanded the baby food market by selling canned strained peas, prunes, carrots and spinach, and beef vegetable soup that were advertised as superior to homemade.

Indeed, the baby food industry has thrived on the idea that manufacturers can somehow create baby food that is superior to what mom and dad could produce.

Why is sugar and salt bad?

Well, we probably shouldn’t have to explain this, but let’s look briefly at why sugar and salt is bad for small children.

Small children’s systems are still developing. That means the food they eat now has health consequences later. It also means that their systems may not be able to handle things the same way an adult’s can. For instance:

• Babies and toddlers’ kidneys can’t process salt as effectively as adult kidneys.
• Excess sugar and salt intake in childhood develops taste preferences that are hard to change as adults.
• Sugar has been linked to type 2 diabetes and immune system disorders (including asthma and allergies) in children.
• Sugar can cause tooth decay, even in infants, and that means big dentist bills later on.
• Sugar can affect the developing flora of children’s gastrointestinal tracts, which means lots of upset tummies.
• Sugar can affect children’s brain development, including creating/worsening mood and behavioural problems. (Translation: tantrums.)
• One study found that children eating a salty diet tended to drink more, including more fattening, sugary soft drinks — a double whammy.

This week’s review

This week’s review looks at a study that critically examined 186 different baby and toddler foods to see how much sugar and salt were in them.

Elliott CD. Sweet and salty: nutritional content and analysis of baby and toddler foods. J Public Health (Oxf). 2010 Jun 28. [Epub ahead of print]

Methods

The researcher went out and bought 186 baby/toddler foods from her local supermarkets, pharmacies, and department stores in Canada. These foods included pureed dinners, desserts, biscuits, cookies, fruit snacks, snack bars, yogurt and cereals.

She didn’t include infant formulas, cereals, or fruit/vegetable purées, because she was interested in baby/toddler food rather than infant food. Plus, single-food purées are usually simple foods with no added sugar or salt.

The researcher looked at the Nutrition Facts labels, specifically examining the salt and sugar content reported on the label. A few months back I reviewed a study that found that labels sometimes aren’t accurate, so we have to keep this in mind with this study.

Results

Of the 186 baby/toddler foods surveyed:

• 63% had high sodium (>130mg/serving) or excessive sugar (more that 20% of calories/serving from sugar). Or both.
• 36 products listed sugar (or a sugar variant, like corn syrup and glucose) as the most abundant (first) ingredient or second most abundant (second) ingredient.

Salt

Of the toddler foods, Gerber Graduates for Toddler Lil’ Entrees (Chicken Pasta Wheel Pickups) had 550 mg sodium/serving or a little more than 1/4 teaspoon of salt. To put that into perspective, a Big Mac has 742 mg of sodium. Health Canada recommends that adults get no more than 1500 mg of sodium per day. So in one serving, a small child could get 1/3 the sodium recommended for a fully grown adult. Eek.

All in all, 12% of all toddler foods in the study had more than 130 mg of sodium/serving.

Sugar

53% of all foods in the study had more than 20% of their calories from sugar (which includes both added and natural sugar). No surprise that 87% baby food desserts were high in sugar, but so were yogurt nibbles (100%) and cereals (76%).

75 products (40% of the products) added sugar, corn syrup, cane syrup, brown sugar, dextrose, fructose, or some other sugar variant.

How much added sugar could there be? This is baby/toddler food. Since ingredients are listed in order of prevalence with the most abundant ingredient listed first, and the least listed last, we can get an idea of how abundant sugar is compared to other ingredients.

In 36 of the products, sugar (or sugar variants) were first or second on the list. Holy crap! The first ingredient is sugar!

Since sugar is higher up on the ingredient list there has to be more sugar than any other ingredient, so if you made an apple sauce with sugar as the number one ingredient, you need more sugar than apples. In adult terms, that would be like eating a medium apple — 182 g — with at least 183 grams of sugar. In more tangible terms that’s over 45 teaspoons of sugar, or nearly a full cup of sugar.

Hey kids! Wash those apples down with a cup of sugar!

These 36 high sugar food were targeted to babies, compared to the high sodium foods that targeted toddlers.

Conclusion

You would hope that as a society we would be more concerned about what our babies ate than adults, but it doesn’t look like it.

There isn’t a universal standard for how much sugar and salt babies and toddlers should eat, and baby/toddler food is not  healthier than adult pre-packaged food.

Processed foods aimed at babies and toddlers are likely to have more salt and sugar than your child should eat.

Aren’t there, y’know, rules?

Not as many as you’d think. There are few specific guidelines or regulations for baby/toddler food.

Nationally, Canada wants adults to eat less salt. Health Canada, a branch of the federal government responsible for the health and safety of Canadians has set goals to reduce adult Canadians’ salt intake. The goal for 2016 is to reduce salt intake by 30% to 2300 mg (about 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt), still well short of the desired 1500 mg/day, but hey, baby steps.

There are recommendations for sugar, too. According to the American Heart Association, adult women and adult men should limit daily added sugar to 100 and 150 calories, respectively.

Great for adults! What about babies and toddlers? Not so much. What happened to the old proverb: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?

Instead of trying to “cure” the health problems of obese adults reared on junk food, wouldn’t it be easier to start children off right, with real food that isn’t laden with salt and sugar?

Bottom line

Being a parent is a tough job. You’re constantly worrying about something. Has my baby car seat expired (yes, they now expire)? Now you’re thinking I have to move to Saskatchewan, open an organic farm and grow heirloom variety bumbleberries to feed Timmy?

Nothing that drastic. Here’s what we recommend.

1. Don’t assume anything. Yes, you’d hope that people wouldn’t feed garbage to children. But they do.
2. Read labels. This is good advice generally. As PNers you know to read labels, so do the same for your child, whether they’re a cooing baby or an enthusiastic 2 year old.
3. Feed your kid real food, just like you’d feed yourself. C’mon — should anyone eat deep-fried mystery fish nuggets, even if they are shaped like fish?
4. Make your own baby/toddler food. As PNers, you probably have a good relationship with your blender too. Do you really need a manufacturer to squish bananas for you, or cut things into little pieces? Grab a fork, mash up those peas and carrots, and save yourself money and worry (plus hauling all those little jars out to the curb on recycling day).

And maybe keep little Billy away from gumming the family boa constrictor.

References

1. Statistics Canada. Overweight Canadian children and adolescents.
2. Centers for Disease Control. Childhood Overweight and Obesity.