Families urged to make ‘sugar swaps’ in children's diets
A new campaign is calling on parents to tackle the amount of sugar their children are eating.
According to a survey from parenting site Netmums, two-thirds of mothers are concerned about the level of sugar in their children’s diets.
At the same time, a campaign by the Government-backed Change4Life has launched, encouraging parents to make simple swaps in their children’s diets to reduce sugar intake. The hope is fewer children will become overweight or obese, and they'll have better dental health too.
The campaign comes just as new rules for school meals come into force.
Obesity in children
Stastistics from the National Child Measurement Programme showed that 22.5% of children aged four to five years old and around a third of children aged between 10 and 11 are overweight or obese. If a person is overweight when young, it is far more likely that they will grow up to be an overweight or obese adult.
A breakdown of the eating habits of children aged four to ten reveals that, while guidelines suggest no more than 10% of a person’s daily energy intake should be made up of sugars, this group are eating up to 50% more.
Of this, 17% of their sugar intake comes from soft drinks, with another 17% coming from biscuits, buns, cakes, and the like. Another 14% comes from confectionery, 13% from fruit juice and 8% from breakfast cereals.
Dental decay
Startlingly, tooth decay was the most common reason for hospital admissions for children aged five to nine in 2012-13.
A shocking 28% of five-year-olds in England are suffering from tooth decay, and nearly a quarter of these children have five or more teeth affected.
Swapping sugars
The Change4Life campaign suggests four simple 'sugar swaps', which offer an easy way to help prevent problems later in life.
1. Breakfast: swap sugary cereal for plain cereal, like a wholewheat biscuit cereal.
2. Drinks: swap high-sugar drinks to sugar-free or no added sugar drinks.
3. After school: instead of muffins, offer fruited teacake.
4. Pudding: swap ice cream for low-fat yoghurt.
By making sugar swaps in a series of trials, 50 families who were found to consume (as a family, not individually) 483g of sugar a day at the beginning of the challenge, reduced their intake to 287g per day with the swaps. That’s the equivalent of roughly 49 sugar cubes!
The campaign
Professor Kevin Fenton, National Director of Health and Wellbeing at Public Health England, says that “we are all eating too much sugar and the impact this has on our health is evident.”
“Simple swaps could lead to big changes if sustained over time.”
Families can register for a free pack of tips, swap ideas and recipe suggestions designed to help parents cut down their household’s sugar intake. At the time of writing, over 40,000 families have signed up for the challenge. The packs also include shopping vouchers to help make the swaps more affordable.
It’s not just about completing the challenge of course. The campaign will have little effect if families don’t stick to their swaps once the campaign ends. However, one of the mothers who took part in the challenge has been quoted by the campaign as saying her children were now asking for snacks like cucumber and hummus rather than sweets – an encouraging, if anecdotal, response.
Hopefully, more people will carry on with good habits, as it could prevent many children who are currently too young to understand the consequences of bad eating habits becoming overweight or obese when they reach adulthood.
Do you think the campaign will have a positive effect on eating habits? Do you have any favourite 'sugar swaps' to share? Let us know in the Comments below.
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