Named A Product To Be Avoided For Children In Their First Years Of Life

Named a product to be avoided for children in their first years of life

A child's diet should be as free of added sugar as possible: it increases the risk of obesity and chronic disease later in life.

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Babies should eat as little added sugar as possible and avoid it entirely. This is a requirement for new dietary guidelines for infants in their first years of life, issued by the American Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. For the first time, such a document contains recommendations for infants. His review of this is published by CNN.

Parents should avoid added sugar in their child's diet because it is strongly associated with childhood obesity and subsequent chronic illness, the guide says. The document emphasizes that added sugar is not required for the development of children.

Excess sugar eaten turns into fat around the heart and belly

Scientists measured the amount of body fat using CT scans of thousands of volunteers. It turned out that the amount of body fat is directly related to the amount of added sugar eaten.

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Added sugar is the sugar that appears in food and drinks during the cooking process. That is, we are not talking about those sugars that are naturally found in foods. Foods with added sugars are usually nutrient-poor - they have a lot of "empty" calories, scientists point out.

“Apples and oranges contain sugar, but they also provide fiber and nutrients. There is sugar in breast milk, but it also has many compounds that boost immunity and fight infection, and has a great combination of fats, proteins, carbohydrates and vitamins that a baby needs,”Steven Abrams, chairman of the committee, told CNN on Nutrition of the American Academy of Pediatrics (American Academy of Pediatrics)

As an example of a drink that children of the first years of life do not need, Abrams cited fruit juice. He stressed that its nutritional value is different from that of a whole fruit. “Therefore juice should be avoided,” the pediatrician said. At the age of 1-3 years, the child should drink no more than 120 milliliters of this drink.

The expert committee identified five types of products with which children receive about 70% of added sugar. These include sweetened drinks, desserts and sugary snacks, candy, sugar tea, and breakfast cereals.

"Early nutritional exposure is now known to be associated with chronic illness later in life," the document says.

For adults, the panel of experts lowered the upper threshold for the recommended sugar intake. Previously, it was "allowed" to get 10% of daily calories from it with an energy value of the diet of 2000 calories. Now that figure has dropped to 6% (120 calories). In comparison, one can of sugar-sweetened soda contains about 150 calories.