sugar makes up about 1/3 of the daily diet of an American child, and the problem starts earlier than you might think. Baby and toddler foods are getting sweeter every year, and most of it is ultra-processed, which could have long-term health impacts like heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer. So, what exactly is in these products, and how can parents tell if they're buying something healthy? I'm MRA, and I'm a health editor at Business Insider. Thanks to more and more miracles, baby food emerged in the 1920s and was ultra-processed from the get-go. The first baby food is attributed to this man called Harold Clap, who was a father in Rochester, New York. He was looking after his infant son while his wife was sick, so he fed him soups and strained peas, and he thought, How about I bottle these things up and give them to local people in my community and even local drugstores? So soon, this was being sold nationwide. Parents with kids who maybe couldn't be breastfed or weren't thriving nutritionally would buy

these broths and stews and strained peas, and their kids would get better up until the 20th century. People thought that adult food was dangerous for babies under the age of one or even two or three. Fruits and vegetables were rarely introduced for a really long time, so their nutritional level was way lower. They really weren't getting that full plethora of protein, carbs, and vitamins. But it was really Gerber who reinvented the wheel. Us know how you get there was this Father and Son duo called Frank and Daniel Gerber who had a canning company in Fremont, Michigan. According to Gerber law, there's a story that Daniel's wife, Dorothy, was at her home trying to strain some peas for their sick infant daughter. Daniel comes home to find Dorothy just completely exhausted, covered in mushed peas. So she asks Daniel could he get people at his canning company to make this for her. Canned fruits and vegetables were at the time in the 20s really expensive and kind of inaccessible, so Gerber was seeing

that if they could make these foods appropriate for babies and make them easily accessible and affordable, there was huge potential for this market. Around 1926-1927, Gerber started testing out some formulas of what they could make for babies. Gerber prepares food for the most important person in the world: your baby. They were testing these products on Daniel's own daughter, Sally, and then also on other infant kids. So, by 1928, they had their first range of baby food. So, that was strained peas, prunes, a beef vegetable soup, and they started rolling them out, and it was a huge hit. To learn why four out of five pediatricians who recommend baby food recommend Gerber baby food, manufacturers were marketing these products as just as nutritious, if not more nutritious, than homemade food. Also, that they were scientific, that they were untouched by human hands. These canned ingredients were basically pummeled with heat to sort of sterilize it and make it shelf-stable, and that process basically breaks down everything inside, so the solids and liquids separate. It can also

impact the color so it could get a little paler. It can also impact the flavor, so to offset that, you can add in sugars and preservatives and fats that will prevent too much destabilization of the product inside. So, babies were getting these foods, but there are longer-lasting effects that we didn't yet appreciate. So, the global baby food market has grown significantly in the last decade, from 9.6 billion in 2010 to 17.9 billion in 2022. Experts largely agree that 70% of food for babies and toddlers in the US is ultraprocessed. So, I'm going to measure how much sugar is in one of these pouches. I'm picking this one; it really highlights that it's naturally flavored, and then it's a yogurt pouch, but it contains 14 g of sugar, of which 8 g are added sugars. And babies and toddlers, according to the WHO, should not be consuming added sugar. So, let's have a look at what that looks like. One. So, that's how much added sugar is in

this pouch three. If you look at this, that looks like a lot of sugar to me. I can't imagine just mixing that with water and just drinking that in one go, but I could imagine consuming all of this within a couple of minutes. So, it just goes to show how much hidden sugar there might be or how much sugar there might be in a product that you don't really notice straight away by looking at the front of the package. This is something that's quite pervasive in all of baby and toddler food. There's a recent report published by the World Health Organization that showed that baby and toddler foods are getting sweeter every year. The amount of sugar either added to or just inherent in these products has ballooned in the last 10 years, and it's something that may not be that straightforward to notice if you're just reading the label, especially if you live in the US. In other countries, sugar that is derived from fruit, such as fruit concentrate, is categorized as free sugars. In the US, that is not always the

case. So, I've got a bunch of products here, and I'm going to go through them starting from about 6 months going up in age. We'll look at the nutrition labels, at the ingredients, and identify what are the red flags and what are the green flags. And we're going to start with pouches because that is the biggest sector in baby food and the fastest growing. This has grown about 900% since 2010. First up, we have Happy Baby green beans, pear, and spinach. So, this pouch is really presented as a dose of vegetables. Even look at the design. It's got this sort of crown of spinach up here and then a bed of green beans down here. It says full serving veggies up here. I had kind of missed the pear, but you know, that's technically there. The first ingredient is going to be the most plentiful. So, in this, it is organic green bean puree, and then the second one is organic pear puree. This is marketed as a veggie, but it's a lot of sugar for a

baby to be eating in a vegetable meal. On this one, there are fewer calories per serving than a dietitian would normally look for inside something for a baby or a toddler. You're looking for 60 calories per 100 G. This is 50 calories per 113 G, so that is a little lower. So overall, not so bad, but there are a couple of red flags, including the low calorie count per serving and the high amount of sugar from pear. In a statement to Business Insider, Happy Family, which is the parent company of Happy Baby, said that this pouch provides a full serving of organic veggies, which for kids is a 1/4 cup. It also said that there's no added sugar, and because baby tastes lean to the naturally sweet, we wanted to support early veggie introduction and acceptance. Next, we are going to look at Earth's Best Organic Apple Peach Oatmeal Fruit and Grain Puree. It has 60 calories per 99 G serving, 5 mg of sodium, total sugars 12 G, and that includes 2 G of

added sugar that is a red flag immediately. The most plentiful ingredient in this pouch is organic apple puree concentrate, then water, then organic peach puree concentrate. The two fruits in this are concentrates. That means that the sugar from the fruit has been extracted and distilled, and it's basically acting as an added sugar. So, the amount of sugar that a child is going to consume from this when they SU it up pretty quickly is not insignificant. If I look on the back of this label, it says made with wholesome ingredients from our family of certified organic farmers. But the problem with that is that that's not actually a regulated term, so it doesn't really mean anything. And the reality is quite a bit away from the general vibe that this package creates. Unfortunately, that's what experts say is a health halo. The WHO specifically calls on companies not to list all of these positives when there are also negatives hidden in the package. In this case, there's added sugar, and the two fruits included in this are actually concentrates, not whole fruits. Now I'm going to get this apples.

blueberries and oats. This is from Happy Baby Organics. So we have 80 calories per 113 g serving. That is good. 13 g of sugar, which is higher than some of the other pouches that I've looked at, but this is a fruit-based sweet product. The fact that you have no added sugar here means that all of the sugar is coming naturally from the fruits in the ingredients list: organic apple puree, organic blueberry puree, organic whole grain oats. If you're going to have oats in a product, you do want it to be whole grain. That means that it contains every aspect of the grain. The only ingredient you might not recognize in this ingredient list is ascorbic acid, and it's used commonly in processed food to inject a bit of vitamin C, but mainly to improve shelf stability and also to kind of fuse back together the nutritional makeup of ingredients that have been broken down in the process. Pouches are really interesting in the sector of baby food. They're really, really popular at the same time because

these things are really mushed up and do have sugars inherently infused into them. You're consuming these sugars much faster and not necessarily burning the calories or digesting the nutrients in the same way that you would with homemade food. What you want them to be doing is seeing a green bean, seeing an apple, touching it, so that they associate Whole Foods positively in their brain and build that connection. And they also have that sort of sensory experience of learning how to interact with foods and feed themselves. We also have Puffs. So baby Puffs is a really classic snack. You can have them from about the age of 6 months old and onwards. They've got a really good level of texture. This one that we got is actually pretty healthy. It contains organic peanut butter, organic whole grain yellow cornmeal, organic deed yellow cornmeal, and sea salt. Very few ingredients, and it doesn't have added sugars, which is good. The thing that doctors usually care about with Puffs is that it can be a vehicle for added sugars, and often they're made with sort

of low nutrient grains like rice or wheat without the germ. So now I'm going to look at some food that's marketed to babies who are slightly older, around 8 months old or crawling. First, we have Happy Baby Organic Yogis Freeze-Dried Yogurt and Fruit Snacks. This one is mixed berry, gluten-free, and made with real yogurt. We really associate yogurt with probiotics and things that are going to nurture your gut, but crucially here, it does say in small print does not contain live and active cultures. So that means it's not necessarily going to be a fountain of probiotics that you might get from a fresh yogurt. Some things that stand out to me: number one, tapioca starch is often used in gluten-free foods, and this is listed as gluten-free, but tapioca starch is often seen as something that is a deliverer of empty calories. And while it can be healthy if you're using it to make something, it can still sort of spike your blood sugar in certain ways. Another red flag is that

this product contains things listed as flavors, mixed berry flavor, and STW flavor. That means that that is not coming from the real fruit itself. You've created that flavor based on using different kinds of chemicals and oils. It's artificially made. Whereas in other products, you might see a fruit concentrate or puree or the fruit itself. It's really confusing because when you get this product that says mixed berry made with real yogurt, it's really kind of portraying this idea that this is real and natural. And then when you look on the back, you get to the very bottom of this long and tiny printed list of ingredients, and you see that some of these flavors aren't actually from the real fruit. These sort of dissolvable yogurt products, they're really common within the baby food sector. And it's a bit of a pet peeve for dietitians and doctors and researchers in this area because they say that this is just a classic way of delivering unnecessary sugars and chemicals and preservatives to kids. Let's open

it so holding this. I can really feel this kind of the milk powder and dried aspect of this. They feel really sort of dry and crispy. Let's give it a taste. Wow, yeah, not very satisfying, I will say. But I am not 8 months old, so maybe it would hit different if I was a baby tasting this. Really helps me to understand what food researchers say when they talk about multiphase processing. When you feel it, it feels crispy. You put it in your mouth, and then it dissolves, and you get this kind of yogurt creaminess, and then it disappears kind of in stly. And that now is making me want to eat another one, which is kind of wild. I can see that process when my brain wants to repeat that multifaceted eating experience. The problem longterm with that, if you're training a baby on how to perceive and interact with food based on something like this, it is a really difficult starting point because you expect that every food you eat is going to deliver these like constant shots of like

dopamine release and that everything's going to have this multiphase multi-textural thing. Then when you get to eating a whole food that is going to be delivering so many great nutrients, it might feel kind of like unexciting by comparison. A baby might be training themselves to expect this level of manufactured brain experience when they eat a food like this. We asked Happy Family for a comment about this snack product. They said it's made with yogurt cultures and fruit, and it's freeze-dried to melt in your mouth for a fun texture adventure. They also said the 1 g of added sugar per serving can be balanced in the context of an overall nutritious eating plan. So now let's look at some foods for toddlers. We're going to start with animal crackers for toddlers. They are cinnamon Graham flavored, and they come in these really sweet animal shapes. On the front, it says that this is delivering 10% of your daily value of iron and vitamin E per serving. Sounds like nice baked with whole grains also.

says non-GMO ingredients. Again, here we have love to learn animal shapes. This is something you see a lot on baby food where it's really marketing, not just a nutritional value, but also a cognitive value that your baby might be using this food to learn and develop. It says it just contains goodness, no artificial sweeteners, flavors, or colors. Total sugars 2g, which includes 2g of added sugar. So, all of the sugar in this is added, which means that it's not naturally coming from the ingredients that it's made from. It's being added in separately. So, ingredients list some of the red flags that stand out to me. Can sugar being one of the most plentiful ingredients is not ideal. There is sunflower oil and then a ton of other chemicals, which are basically used to fortify these ingredients against the process. It's just a whole mix of preservatives that reads more like something I would see on a store-bought packet of bread for an adult. If you Google each of these individual things

they're not necessarily bad for you in tiny amounts, but the thing about having them all together is it's an indication that this is ultra-processed. And then it's important to note that the front of this package really advertises the fact that this is high in iron and vitamin E, but when you look at the ingredients list, it shows you that those are things that have been added in as supplements. Despite having read this whole ingredient list that makes it sound awful, they do look good. I'm excited to try them. Wow, okay, I'm smelling that sugar. Smells great. Oh, this is really sweet, actually. There's a little dog, kind of scarily. There is another dog that doesn't have eyes. These are really cute. Let's give it a go. I really like crackers like this, even though I'm in my 30s, but this is really sweet. The reason that sugar is risky for kids, especially when they're under the age of two, is that their whole body is developing, and recent studies have shown that kids who consume a high

amount of sugar in their early years has a much higher risk in their whole lifetime of having a stroke, heart attack, developing diabetes, obesity, all these kinds of things. The WHO has explicitly called on manufacturers to stop putting added sugar in food that is marketed to kids of this age because it can create these cascading health effects and a level of addiction. In a statement to Business Insider, Gerber said that these animal crackers are an occasional snack option when incorporated within a varied balanced diet. So, let's look at some toddler milk here. I have Nestle Neo. This is for age three and up. It contains vitamin A and D, iron, and zinc immunity. There's a big badge here that says it has iron to help with brain development. Again, classic claim made with baby food. Wow, huge ingredient list. So, some things that stand out before we get to the nutritional facts is that there is so much sweetener in here, corn syrup, and sugar. You also have milk fat and nonfat milk. These are things that have been processed and broken apart and then

the real giveaway for that is that you have this whole collection of other chemicals, including sodium ascorbate, ferrous sulfate, niacinamide. So, this has a bunch of stuff added back in, mainly because all of that stuff was stripped out in the process. This is why doctors agree that toddler milk is kind of unnecessary, because when you get to the age of three, you can consume milk; like, you don't need this necessarily. It's a sector that has been created because people buy it. We asked Nestlé for a comment about Neato. They said this product helps parents to meet certain nutritional needs of young children above one year of age. We'll also look at pouches specifically for toddlers. So, there is Beach Nut iron and zinc, this smoothie made by Sprout Organics, which honestly sounds like a kind of smoothie I would want to make myself. So, the distinction between these pouches and pouches you see for younger ages is that pouches for toddlers tend to have more ingredients or ingredients that would be

harder for a younger baby to digest. So, let's look at this one. You can already see on the front of the label that it has flax seed, which is a really healthy kind of seed, really good for your digestion. But it's, you know, slightly more uous to digest. So, this is something that would more be appropriate for an older child to consume. Looking at the label is really helpful, actually, because here I've got a lot of natural ingredients that I recognize. Here, there are a couple that stand out that have sulfate, monohydrate, pyro phosphate. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's unhealthy, but it's a little red flag that there may be ultra-processing at play, things stripped out, or things added in. So, it's something to research for yourself. Beachnut said in a statement that they believe in choosing purposeful ingredients to help introduce babies and toddlers to a wide variety of flavors and textures. So, the thing with ultr-processed baby and toddler food that has like little droplets of processing and

sweetener and preservatives and artificial colors. It's really introducing babies and toddlers to this kind of texture and flavor of foods, opening the door to this whole world of kid foods. Once you get over the age of six, that's when this whole industry explodes into all the like sugars and preservatives and added colors. You see things like cereals, which look really exciting. They've got all these colors, and they have the same kinds of claims like excellent source of vitamin D. But if you look at the label, this contains a whole world of things. It contains artificial colors that doctors really warn against, including red 40, which has been linked to different issues with heart, and also there are some research that links it to ADHD, yellow 6, blue 1, and other color added. There's all these kind of vague terms on this label that really don't specify what you're consuming, but the front of it really platforms that this is going to be a good source of nutrients. Ultra-processed foods are associated with short-term and

long-term health impacts for everyone, and babies have their whole life ahead of them. Short term, there might be skin issues, there might be digestive issues, but long-term, it increases your risk of things like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, chronic metabolic issues. So, that's the big picture concern of babies having ultra-processed food as a high proportion of their diet. So, to wrap up, if you are in the supermarket and you're between all these different labels, really focus on things that have very few ingredients, ideally three or less, no added sugar, no artificial sweeteners, no added colorants, and natural sources of nutrients and red flags. You know, avoid corn syrup, any ingredients you don't recognize, preservatives, colorants. The most important thing for parents to hold on to when they're trying to navigate this incredibly complex industry is that the responsibility is not all on you, the parent, to work this out. The responsibility is really on manufacturers and regulators to make this easier for parents in the US and around the world. Parents really, really

don't have time to be making all of the right decisions. There is so much pressure on parents. If you have to use a pouch, use a pouch. And where possible, give your child a piece of broccoli so that they get the experience of recognizing that food, playing with that food, touching that food, smelling that food. But if you're in a bind and you're picking up one of these ingredients, that's absolutely fine. The point here is doing the best that you can when you can and not holding all of the anxiety yourself. Who designs these animals? There's also a cow and a duck. These are really cute. And a bear and a cat.

How Ultra-Processed Baby Food Gets Kids Hooked On Sugar | Ultra-Processed Life | Business Insider

What you want to know about business. 

Visit our homepage for the top stories of the day: https://www.businessinsider.com 
Business Insider on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/businessinsider
Business Insider on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insiderbusiness
Business Insider on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/businessinsider
Business Insider on Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com/discover/Business_Insider/5319643143
Business Insider on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@businessinsider

If you have a permissions or licensing request, please connect with our partners at PARS International who will be able to provide you with an accurate quote for the overall usage rights that you’re interested in. A representative from PARS will contact you shortly after filling out this request form: https://www.parsintl.com/publications/insider/
