In this article you will find tips on excessive sugar consumption in children and its consequences on health, the most consumed products and the importance of consuming a diet as natural as possible.
Experts in the field strongly recommend a low intake of free sugars throughout life, placing consumption below 10%, even in recent studies, suggesting that it be reduced to 5% of total caloric intake.
People need to know that their children should not exceed the maximum amount of 15 grams per day of sugar.
It should be noted that people need to know the difference between free sugar and intrinsic sugar in food. The intrinsic one is the one that is found naturally in foods that have not been handled, such as whole fruits and vegetables, and the free ones are those that are explicitly added to a product, added sugars. Free sugars are also found in juices or syrups, when they process food and separate it from its matrix, they become free sugars.
These free sugars can be found in the following products:
- Breakfast cookies, 5 cookies contain a total of 6.8 grams of sugar.
- Flavored yogurts: on average, a dairy dessert, such as coconut yogurt, contains 9.4 grams of sugar per 100 g of yogurt, since yogurts are usually 125g, this means that only 1 flavored yogurt contains 14, 3 grams of sugar.
- Fruit juice per 100 ml of juice contains on average 9.3 grams of sugar.
- Pastries, for example a small palm of chocolate, are about 25 grams per palm containing 6.5 grams of sugar, just for a small palm.
- Ketchup, contains 19 g of sugar per 100 g of sauce.
- Chips, a bag of worms is about 6 grams of sugar.
All of the above products are usually the most consumed by children, so the WHO recommends not to exceed 15 g of sugar per day.
Nowadays, we see all kinds of information on TV about how important it is to feed a child with slogans about a product that defines it as “everything you need”. A product will not give us what a child needs, natural nutrition and no processed products.
After your child has reached the age of 1, his diet should be based on whole fruits, natural yogurts, vegetables, meat, fish, legumes, tubers, cereals, eggs. It should be noted that no processed product is necessary or essential for its development.
There has been a lot of talk lately about how bad sugar is, so many brands have chosen to sell their products under the slogan “low in sugar” or “0% added sugars”, these products do not mean that they do not contain sugar or are so healthy, normally these products are full of sweeteners and artificial flavors, they are not healthy for our health or for the little ones.
In conclusion, people need to understand that, the child does not need extra sugar consumption to grow and develop, he needs to eat natural foods and without the need for them to be processed industrially and thus promote lifelong health.