6 “Healthy” Foods That Are Harming Your Family’s Teeth
We all want to ensure that our families eat healthy diets. But what if I told you that foods that are being sold to you as healthy, are harming your children’s teeth?
Every time we go shopping, supermarkets bombard us with brightly-packaged foods. These foods claim all sorts of health benefits and are manufactured to make them as easy to consume as possible.
Unfortunately, these health claims are not always what they seem. Sometimes we need to stop and look a little bit closer to see if we are buying something that is healthy or harmful.
At Coatbridge Family Dental Care we’ve looked at the sugar content of six foods marketed as healthy and nutritious and aimed at children. What we’ve found might change the way that you’re feeding your family.
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Processed baby food
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Processed dried fruit snacks
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Yoghurts
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Cereals
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Fruit smoothies
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Milkshakes
1. Processed Baby Food
The busier our lifestyles get, the more we turn to convenience foods to help us out. Baby food pouches, despite only coming to the market a decade ago, have become popular for busy parents looking for a quick and mess-free way to feed their babies.
However, in 2022, growing concerns prompted the British Dental Association to carry out a study into the sugar levels in baby food pouches. More than a quarter of the 109 pouches tested, “contained more sugar by volume than Coca-Cola”, researchers found.
Here’s an example of a baby food pouch marketed as being suitable for 4 month old babies:
You’ll notice from the back of the pack that there are no added sugars or salt, nothing artificial and that the ingredients are organic. That all sounds great. What busy parent wouldn’t want this for their child? But look closer. Look at the nutrition table and find the row, Carbohydrates, of which sugars. This tells you how much sugar is in the product.
15.8g of sugar in a 120g pouch. That’s the same as 3 teaspoons of sugar in one pouch. It’s also half the recommended daily intake of sugar for an ADULT!!!
Let’s compare with the nutritional label from a can of Coca Cola.
The amount of sugar in 100ml of Coca Cola is 10.6g.
The amount of sugar in 100g of this pouch of bananas and peaches is 13.2g.
Yes, there is more sugar in the baby food than there is in the can of coke.
There is no difference in the sugar which is in the baby pouch and the sugar which is in the Coke. Just because the sugar comes from fruit does not make it safe. Both are free sugars and both will rot your baby’s teeth.
I guess the question is would you give a can of Coke to a 4 month old baby?
But the labelling says “No Added Sugar”
And the labelling is correct, there is no added sugar in this product. However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a huge amount of free sugars in the baby food itself.
What are free sugars?
Most people know that adding sugar to food or drinks causes tooth decay, e.g. sugar added to a cup of tea or a bowl of cereal, or jam added to toast. Most of us also know that sugar added in manufacturing is as bad, e.g. sugar added to produce biscuits and cakes or soft drinks. Both of these types of sugars are free sugars.
But, if the sugars which are naturally occurring in foods are highly processed they are also classed as free sugars. They also cause tooth decay and diet-related disease such as type 2 diabetes. If you buy a product which is made from fruit or vegetable juice, concentrate, puree, paste, powder or which has been extruded, then these sugars are just as bad for your teeth and health as added sugars.
When you eat a whole piece of fruit like an apple or a strawberry, the sugars in the fruit are contained within the cell wall of the fruit. This means they are not free sugars and do not have the same ability to cause tooth decay or diet related disease. When fruit is pureed or juiced, the sugars are freed from the cell walls and now become classed as free (added) sugar.
Unfortunately, it is these ultra-processed fruit purees that are used in baby food. So, yes there may be no ‘added sugars’ in shop-bought baby food. But the naturally occurring sugars in fruit purees cause just as much damage as if you’d added a few teaspoons of sugar to your baby’s lunch.
Also, eating high sugar processed purees develops a taste in babies for high sugar foods, which drives a desire for these as they get older.
“There is evidence to suggest that introducing sweet foods at an early age leads to a lifetime preference for excessively sweet foods.” according to the British Dental Association
So the opposite is true. If we give our babies less sweet foods they will have less desire for sugary snacks as they get older. This means they will be less likely to suffer from tooth decay or diet-related disease, later in life.
How much is too much sugar?
If you’ve read our blog Tooth Decay: The Causes, Symptoms and How to Fix It you’ll know just how much sugar is too much.
This infographic shows the NHS recommendations for the maximum amount of sugar you should eat a day. These are based on the WHO advice that the amount of free sugars that you eat should be to less than 10% of your total energy intake, as this study shows.
As you can see it is recommended that children under 4 avoid sweetened drinks and food with sugar added to it. These sugar laden processed baby foods should be avoided.
This is a great NHS resource to learn more about sugar and how to reduce how much you eat
What about home-made baby food?
The less processing, the less sugar is freed from the cell walls of fruit and vegetables. Home-made baby food is not subject to the same intense maceration and heat that processed baby food is.
The recommendations are that babies are introduced to solid food at 6 months. At this age food may need just light stewing and/or mashing. They may also be able to eat soft finger foods like pieces of banana. Foods prepared like this at home will have significantly less free sugars than shop-bought processed baby food. And therefore will carry less risk of tooth decay and diet-related disease. Less pureed food also has the advantage of developing the baby’s ability to chew, swallow and speak.
Something else to watch
In processed baby food, fruit and vegetables are often combined to make less sweet foods more palatable. Look at this packet of Butternut squash, carrot, apple and prunes.
Having squash first in the list implies that it will be the main ingredient in this pouch. In actual fact, apple is. Apple puree is extremely sweet. Looking at the ingredients, we can see that this pouch contains 10.8g of sugar, that’s 2 whole teaspoons in this tiny pack! I don’t know about you but I’d pick this up presuming it would be mainly vegetables and therefore low in sugar!
Putting fruits and vegetables together like this also means that babies don’t get to experience the taste of the individual vegetable. If you give a child who’s tasted this puree home prepared butternut squash, they’ll reject it because it won’t taste as sweet as the shop-bought pouch.
And one more thing
Many of todays shop-bought baby foods come in “easy-to-use, no mess” pouches. Please don’t let your baby or child eat directly from them. Sucking on a pouch of food increases the contact time of the food with their teeth, causing more tooth decay.
Lets have a look at what else is out there beyond baby food.
2.Processed dried fruit snacks
These snacks came onto the market when my children were at primary school. I’d never seen anything like them before. Brightly-coloured and carrying similar health claims to baby food pouches, they look like an ideal lunchbox snack. And shaped into stars, strips and strings, they definitely appeal to young children. A brilliant way of getting fruit into our kids – or are they?
Processed dried fruit snacks are made from juices, purées, pastes and extruded fruit and vegetables. And as we’ve already discovered these are essentially free (added) sugars. So despite being marketed as healthy due to their high fruit content, these snacks are actually just as bad for your teetha as sweets! The stickiness of processed dried fruit means they also stick to teeth. This increases the time they are in the mouth and the damage they are doing to teeth, so the attack is twofold!
To give you a better idea, according to Action on Sugar, there’s about 18g of sugar in a processed dried fruit snack. To consume the same amount of sugar through real fruit, a child would need to eat an entire punnet of strawberries!
Which of these do you think are the healthiest?
Which of these do you think contain the most sugar?
Interestingly they contain almost the same amount of sugar per 100gram, 58g per 100g (that’s means they are more than half sugar!). There is no difference in the sugar between these two products. One doesn’t have “healthier” sugar, one isn’t better for you because it’s fruit. They both contain the same amount of free sugar which causes tooth decay and diet-related diseases such as diabetes.
These products are essentially the same as packets of sweets, but they have been marketed so cleverly to make them appear healthy. So when you’re making up lunchboxes, treat these foods as a sweet treat, not a replacement for fruit.
Many of these types of snacks with the highest sugar content are coated in yoghurt, so perhaps yoghurts are the next thing we should take a look at.
Yoghurts
Not all yoghurts are created equal. Fruit-flavoured yoghurts tend to have fruit puree added. So although there may be “no added sugar”, remember what we already discovered about fruit purees and concentrates. The best thing to do is check the labels for the ingredients and the amount of sugar.
Remember to look for “Carbohydrates, of which sugars”
5g is the same as 1tsp. Check the table above to see how the maximum number of teaspoons your child should be having a day.
Be careful too of yoghurts in pouches and tubes. Anything that is squeezed into the mouth, spends way more time in contact with the teeth and is more likely to cause tooth decay. A good old pot and a spoon, while it might be messier, is much better for your teeth.
When my kids were little I gave them plain natural yoghurt with cut up strawberries and grapes. No added sugar and no fruit puree. So a healthier alternative to fruit-flavoured ultra-processed yoghurts.
Breakfast Cereals
Despite the efforts being made to make breakfast cereals more nutritious, it’s still amazing how many high-sugar cereals are out there. And that they are being marketed directly to children.
Frosties remains one of the best-selling breakfast cereals, with almost 3 tsps of sugar in a recommended daily serving. Bear in mind that the recommended daily intake of sugar for a child aged 7-10 is 5 tsps.
How many children do you know stop at one bowl of cereal?
There’s a good chance that children eating sugary cereals are having their entire recommended daily intake of sugar before they’ve even left the house in the morning!
Check out the
Top 10 Highest Sugar Cereals with Child Friendly Packaging
Top 10 Lowest Sugar Cereals with Child Friendly Packaging
And it’s not just children’s cereals. Crunchy Nut Cornflakes are the best–selling cereal in the uk. Each 30g bowl contains 2 tsps of sugar – a third of your daily recommended intake as an adult.
Fruit smoothies
Often touted as healthy and 1 of your 5 a day, the sugar content of smoothies, even those aimed at kids can be shocking. This Innocent smoothie claims:
“We never add any sugar”
Thank goodness they don’t! Because this smoothie already contains 3 tsps of free sugars! And as we’ve discussed, just because they are not added, doesn’t mean they aren’t doing the same harm.
We have the same situation in smoothies as we have in baby food. Fruit is pureed so the concentrated sugars from the fruit are released. Meaning the amount of sugar delivered by one of these smoothies is so much more than if you were to just eat the real, whole fruit.
And as we’ve already covered, slowly sucking on sugar like kids often do with a smoothie, is just bathing their teeth in sugar for the whole time it takes them to drink it.
Milkshakes/Flavoured milk
Milk is super healthy for children and a very important part of their diets. Milk contains lactose which is a naturally occurring sugar. If your children are drinking plain milk, don’t worry too much about the lactose in it.
Lactose will only cause tooth decay if it is in contact with the teeth for prolonged periods of time. This is why we recommend that babies/toddlers don’t go to bed with a bottle of milk to graze on throughout the night. And also that their teeth are brushed after their last bottle before bed.
But, milkshakes are a whole different kettle of fish. Take these for example. Colourful packs, clearly marketed towards children
Explicitly saying ”Made for kids” on the front. In one of these cartons, there is 18g of sugar! That is 3 and a half teaspoons of sugar!
Remember children between 4 and 6 should have no more than 19g of sugar per day. So one of these cartons is the entire sugar recommendation for a young child for the day!
It’s easy to see in these examples how we’re starting to bring up children who desire sweet foods. What chance do they stand when they get out into the big wide world with a craving for sweet things and are subject to the marketing forces of the big food companies?
What scares me most is the health claims that these products are covered in. Here’s a few examples.
It’s so difficult not be drawn into them.
“1 of your 5 a day”
“No artificial additives”
“Good stuff inside”
“organic”
“No added sugar”
“Boosted with Vitamin C”
“Low in fat”
“A natural source of calcium”
And while I have no doubt that all these things are true, they give an impression of health.
It is irrelevant if a product is organic or contains no added salt or sugar if it is dangerous for the health of our children.
As the BDA say “Baby foods simply cannot be considered healthy if they have a detrimental impact on a child’s oral health”
Manufacturers have a responsibility to our children to reduce the amount of sugar in their snacks. And the government needs to implement legislation to limit the amount of sugar in children’s food and protect our children. At the very least these foods and drinks should all be carrying a “high sugar” warning.
As I scroll back through this blog the other thing I notice is the appearance of all these products. Brightly coloured, cartoon characters, often with “for kids”. These products are all marketed aggressively towards children. When your child sees these in the supermarket, how long is it before they ask for them? They are created to be appealing to children. Manufacturers also have a responsibility to stop directly marketing these unhealthy foods to children.
What can I do to make sure my family are eating healthy foods?
It’s not easy, when you’re busy working or rushing around after everyone, but there are things you can do to make sure your family are healthy.
1. Become a ingredients list detective
Look for the ingredients we’ve talked about such as fruit purees and fruit concentrates
2.Check out the sugar content
Look at nutrition tables on the backs of packets and find the sugars line. Check how much sugar there is in the pack size that you have and compare it with the recommended daily intake for the age of your child
3.Get to know how much is too much
Use the table in this blog to learn how many teaspoons of sugar is recommended for everyone in your family. Remember that 1 teaspoon = 5g
4. Keep the foods we’ve talked about in this blog as treats, not everyday foods
5. As much as possible make your own baby food
6. Give children whole fruit where appropriate and possible
7. Stick to water and milk for drinks
Finding real healthy alternatives
So what are some real healthy foods that are alternatives to the fake healthy foods?
We all want to do the best for our families, but sometimes it can be difficult in this world to tell what’s healthy and what isn’t!
Last year there were 31,165 children teeth extracted in NHS hospitals due to tooth decay. This is a disease caused by too much sugar which is fully preventable. As parents we can do our bit by making sure our families are eating as healthily as possible.
If you’d like to find out more about “healthy” foods that aren’t quite as healthy as they seem, click on the links below or ask our team next time your in the practice.
At Coatbridge Family Dental Care we’re here for you and your family. Find out more about family dentistry at Coatbridge Family Dental Care here.
Here’s a great video from Childsmile about hidden sugars.