How much sugar is hidden in baby food?

Some baby foods contain as much sugar and saturated fats as chocolate biscuits or cheeseburgers, the British pressure group Children's Food Campaign announced earlier this month.

It published a survey of over 100 foods aimed at babies and toddlers and among those singled out were Farley's rusks which are 29 percent sugar.

Excessive intake of sugar is a leading cause of obesity.

"The results are staggering," campaign spokeswoman Christine Haigh was quoted as saying. "Many foods marketed for babies and young children are advertised as healthy. In reality, in terms of sugar and saturated fat content, some are worse than junk food."

Only half the products surveyed were low in saturated fat, salt and sugar, as defined in Britain's Food Standards Agency guidance.

So how do the kiddie foods on South Africa's shelves shape up in terms of sugar, fat and sodium (salt) content?

Not very well.

Let's look at Nestle's Milo breakfast cereal. The manufacturer makes much of the fact that it is "wholegrain", but what the box doesn't proclaim in big letters is the fact that the product is more than one third sugar - 34.1g per 100g.

Any product with more than 15g of sugar per 100g is considered a high-sugar food.

The Milo cereal is also relatively high in sodium - 143mg per 100g.

According to nutritional standards laid down by the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Food Standards Australia New Zealand, the only cereals that get the "green light" are those which, per 100g, have total fat of less than 3g, saturated fat of less than 1.5g, sugars lower than 5g, and sodium content under 120mg.

That would be a "Weetbix" type cereal and there aren't too many of them on the market.

Interestingly, the Nestle Milo product on sale in Australia has less salt, sugar and sodium than its South African counterpart, but more fibre. In other words, the South African version is considered less healthy on four counts.

Asked why this was so, a Nestle spokesperson said the products had two different recipes and were produced in two different factories, using raw materials from different countries.

"We expect to have the requisite local manufacturing processes in the future that would help us adapt the recipes for our market," I was told.

The Milo cereal is in good company, of course - both Kellogg and Bokomo have a range of cereals which comprise about one third sugar and are relatively high in sodium.

While at pains to point out breakfast cereals only contribute a small proportion of a child's daily sugar, salt and sodium intake, the manufacturers are responding to pressure worldwide to reduce both, and introduce more wholegrain.

But many "wholegrain" cereals are in fact a mix of whole grain and refined grains.

A purer form of wholegrain breakfast is oatmeal, or, as most refer to it, porridge.

Smart move

Last August Consumer Watch reported on the EU Parliament's decision to force manufacturers to add a health warning to their packs if they contained one or more of six named artificial food colourants.

The warning "May have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children" will be compulsory on all foods containing tartrazine, (E102) quinoline yellow (E104), sunset yellow (E110), carmoisine (E122), ponceau 4R (E124) or allura red (E129) - after a scientific study found this to be the case.

Now Nestle SA has announced this month it will begin introducing its famous Smarties with non-artificially coloured sugar coatings.

They were trialled in the UK in 2006 and then went on sale in Europe and Australasia. South Africa is the fourth country to get rid of the old, artificially coloured Smarties, which contain three of the listed colourants.

The new, artificial colourant-free Smarties will be slightly paler and less shiny than the old ones, and there won't be a blue one, because the manufacturer hasn't yet figured out how to produce that colour without the artificial colourant.

The taste will apparently be unaffected.

So what's in those bars?

Catering for our desire for on-the-go convenience foods is a growing range of breakfast bars or snack bars.

And as they bear the brand names of popular breakfast cereals, many a reluctant young breakfast eater munches one of these instead of breakfast, often in the car on the way to school.

But they contain even more sugar than the sugary breakfast cereals, thanks to ingredients such as condensed milk, chocolate and glucose syrup.

And they aren't exactly low fat.

Kellogg's Coco Pops cereal and milk bars are 40 percent sugar and seven percent fat.

Bokomo Oatees bar, chocolate flavour, is a whopping 46 percent sugar and 17 percent fat - more than an Oreo chocolate biscuit! (30.1 percent and 16.7 percent respectively.)

The Bokomo Pronutro Play Bar label doesn't reveal the sugar content but does declare its fat content - 15.1 percent which includes a small amount of trans fat, the unhealthiest fat of all.

Commenting, Bokomo's head of marketing, Anchen Myburgh-Creighton, said: "Advocating the comparison of the total sugar content of products is not necessarily of physiological relevance. This originates from the outdated concept which divided carbohydrates into categories based on their chemical structure rather than their physiological effect, glycemic index (GI).

"Total carbohydrates are of higher priority to Bokomo than total sugars which explains the rationale behind Bokomo only declaring total carbohydrates on the newly launched ProNutro Bars, as opposed to the actual sugar content.

"But we are happy to revise the strategy to include both on all labels in future considering the consumers' obvious interest in the total sugar content of our products," she said.

As for the sugar content of Oatees, the label was very old, Myburgh-Creigton said, and when re-analysed by an accredited laboratory, the sugar content was likely to be in the region of 35 percent - far less than the present 46 percent.

She said the company would only know the sugar content of the Pronutro bar when it was reanalysed, but stressed that the high-protein, high-fibre, high-carb, low-fat product was aimed primarily at sportsmen and women, with children as a "secondary target market".

The company also aimed to remove trans fat from its formulations completely, she said.

And a good few spoonfuls of sugar for baby, too!

I thought it odd that two Purity products - part of the Tiger Brands stable - don't reveal sugar content on their labels either.

The omission on the box of teething biscuits seemed particularly glaring, given the intended purpose of the product and the undisputed link between sugar consumption and tooth decay.

Turns out the packaging is in the process of being revised, and the new box will list the sugar content - 3g per biscuit or 25 percent of total content.

And then there's the Purity Goodies Strawberry Flavoured Drink, a powder which is added to milk to form the drink.

Only the carbohydrate content - 88.3 percent - is revealed on the label.

But, like Nesquik and Milo, the main ingredient of this product is sugar.

The Purity people confirmed that the 88 percent carbohydrate content was in fact sugar.

But it's healthier than other sugar-based powders, according to Purity. "It is meeting the need for a preservative free, colourant free product with real fruit and no artificial flavourants, and in addition this product has added prebiotics which assists in the maintenance of a healthy digestive system."

The food industry always argues that sugar is unfairly demonised, and points out that when consumed in moderation, it can be part of a healthy, balanced diet.

The trouble is, with so many products aimed at children being high in sugar, from breakfast cereals to biscuits to snack bars and fizzy drinks, moderation goes out the window. Especially when a taste for sweetness is cultivated in babies from 12 months by adding flavoured sugar to milk.

For a cut-out Food for Kids nutrition guide and an easy-to-follow labelling guide, go to this link on Australian consumer group Choice's website: www.choicefoodforkids.com.au/page/our-criteria

• This article was originally published on page 7 of The Star on May 18, 2009