Aug. 23, 2024 – The struggle is real: When you’re a busy parent looking for easy, tasty foods for your little one, those squeeze pouches are irresistible, especially when they have promising claims on the front of the packaging. “Organic,” “no added sweeteners,” “preservative-free” – that sounds healthy, right?
Well, according to a new study that looked at over 600 products from the top 10 grocery stores in the U.S., nearly 60% of baby foods don’t meet the nutrition standards set by the World Health Organization (WHO). The study was published this week in the journal Nutrients.
The researchers found that 70% of products for infants and toddlers failed to meet the organization’s protein requirements and 44% exceeded total sugar requirements. Lead study author Elizabeth Dunford, PhD, a food health policy expert and associate professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, is also a mother of two young children.
When she was shopping at big-box stores, she became fascinated by the ready-to-eat options in the baby food aisles. Out of her own curiosity, she collected all the baby food products herself before a team of researchers helped her analyze them.
“I’m educated in this area, and even I find it difficult to decide, relatively quickly, which product in the baby food aisle is the better choice for my children,” said Dunford. “I myself am guilty of picking up a convenient squeeze pouch that had a claim on the front that grabbed me.”
Remarkably, 0% of the products that were studied met the promotional claims used to market the product on its packaging.
Not meeting or exceeding the WHO’s nutrition requirements doesn’t just have short-term health implications for kids. Introducing foods at that age will shape their future palate, influencing what flavors and ingredients they’ll prefer down the line, said Denise Diaz Payán, PhD, a health policy professor with expertise in nutrition and health disparities at the Joe C. Wen School of Population and Public Health at the University of California, Irvine.
The reliance on squeeze pouches also poses a particular threat to kids’ eating development.
“Sucking down applesauce from a pouch takes away this ability to learn how to eat from a spoon,” said Dunford. “If they never start eating from a tub with a spoon and get all messy like we all did when we were young, they sort of lose that important eating behavior development phase.”
Dunford recommends that when parents are shopping for their kids, they take a quick look at the back of the package to see what the total sugar content is, see whether there are any added sugars, and scan the list of ingredients to see if there’s anything they don’t understand.
But not everyone is flipping the package around to look at the label, Payán noted. Research on the topic has shown that many groups of people don’t; and if they do, even fewer know what they’re reading or looking for. That’s why switching to front-of-package labeling, which has been done in Chile, Mexico, and other countries around the world, would be a small but potentially game-changing policy change.
