by Marion Nestle

Currently browsing posts about: Children

Jun 21 2021

Danone-funded consensus statement: “Growing up” formulas, Brazil style

The Consensus Statement: Consensus of the Brazilian Association of Nutrology on Milky Feeding of Children Aged 1–5 Year Old. International Journal of Nutrology. 2020; 13 (01): 002-016.

Purpose: “To publish a consensus on the milky feeding of children aged between 1 and 5 years old, in the face of the nonuniformity of indication and the lack of standardization, in Brazil, on the nomenclature and classification of milky products produced for this stage.”

Method: Literature review and members discussion.

Result: Nutritional deficiencies are common among Brazilian children.

Recommendations (among many others)

Recognize milk-based weaning products as a category separate from infant formula.
Consider milk-based weaning products as a strategy for providing additional nutritional advantages over cow’s milk (they they are fortified with essential nutrients).

Conflicts of interest: The Brazilian Association of Nutrology has received financial support from the company Danone Nutricia to enable this consensus to be achieved by supporting the expenses inherent to the execution of the project. The authors expressly state that there was no interference by the company Danone Nutricia in the content of the material and all the information contained in the consensus represents exclusively the views of the authors and of the Brazilian Association of Nutrology, based on the bibliographic review used for its execution.”

Acknowledgments: The Brazilian Association of Nutrology thanks the company Danone Nutricia for the financial support that allowed this consensus to be reached.

Comments: Danone paid for a consensus statement that conveniently promotes its formula and weaning products. The company markets its products (overtly and by implication) as having nutritional advantages over breastfeeding and traditional foods.

The consensus statement supports that implication, even though it also recommends promotion of breastfeeding and control of misleading marketing.

Some other points to note:

The Brazilian Association of Nutrology members are not nutritionists; they are medical professionals who specialize in nutrition.
The statement does not say much about healthy diets for children or the need to minimize kids’ intake of ultra-processed foods. Instead, it mandates Danone’s milk-based products, which meet the definition of ultra-processed (industrially produced, made with ingredients unavailable in supermarkets, cannot be made in home kitchens).
Here, for example, is the ingredient list for Aptamil 2.

Dairy-based blend (of which 28% is fermented) [Lactose (from milk), Vegetable oils (Palm oil, Coconut oil, Rapeseed oil, Sunflower oil, High oleic sunflower oil), Skimmed milk, Demineralised whey (from milk), Whey concentrate (from milk), Calcium phosphate, Fish oil, Potassium chloride, Potassium citrate, Calcium carbonate, Choline chloride, Vitamin C, Sodium citrate, Emulsifier (Soy lecithin), Inositol, Magnesium chloride, L-Carnitine, Antioxidant (Ascorbyl palmitate), Nicotinamide, Panthothenic acid, Vitamin E, Riboflavin, Thiamin, Vitamin B6, Potassium iodide, Folic acid, Vitamin K1, Biotin, Vitamin B12], Galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS) (from milk), Fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS), Whey protein (from milk), Magnesium hydrogen phosphate, Oil from Mortierella Alpina, Sodium chloride, Taurine, Ferrous sulphate, L-Tryptophan, Zinc sulphate, Cytidine 5′-monophosphate, Uridine 5′-monophosphate sodium salt, Adenosine 5′-monophosphate, Inosine 5′-monophosphate sodium salt, Guanosine 5′-monophosphate sodium salt, Copper sulphate, Vitamin E, Vitamin A, Manganese sulphate, Sodium selenite, Vitamin D3.

The statement appears to be in response to Brazil’s dietary guidelines, which urge avoidance of ultraprocessed foods.
More specifically, the statement responds to Brazil’s dietary guidelines for children under the age of 2. (the English version is here). These say: “Ultra-processed foods should not be given to children and should be
avoided by adults” (p. 68) and:

Attention: There are products called “growing-up milks” that should not be mistaken for infant formula or
whole-fat cow’s milk…Although the packaging carries the information that these products should not be used to feed children under 1 year of age, in fact they are not intended for children under 2 years of age because of the presence of sugar and food additives. They do not replace breast milk or infant formula. Growing-up milks have packaging and labels that are very similar to those of infant formula, are usually placed next to infant formulas on supermarket and pharmacy shelves and have lower prices. Read the labels carefully.

My conclusion: These products are designed to keep parents buying name-brand products by marketing them as “healthier” than cow’s milk or relatively unprocessed family foods. Avoid.

Many thanks to Brazilian nutritionist, Maria Birman, for alerting me to this one and sending documents and photos.

Tags: Children, Infant-formula

May 4 2021

What is the FDA doing about heavy metals in baby food?

I’ve written previously about the alarming findings of toxic heavy metals in baby foods. These toxins are in all foods, but are particularly harmful to infants and young children, a situation that calls for immediate FDA action to set limits on the amounts these foods contain.

The FDA has a Q and A on this issue. It has also issued previous guidance.

In response to many complaints, the FDA has now issued a plan for action: “Closer to Zero.”

Translation: the agency will propose action levels (limits on allowable amounts), consult with stakeholders, finalize the limits, and then evaluate how the whole thing works to reduce intake levels.

Timeline: It plans to do this starting now, with the aim of finishing the process by 2025.

The FDA must not consider limiting toxic metals in baby food to be urgent.

No wonder some members of Congress have introduced la bill to force the FDA to set limits for the most common toxic metals within a year. It suggests what those limits should be: 10 parts per billion for inorganic arsenic in baby food (15 ppb for cereal); 5 ppb for both cadmium and lead (10 ppb for cereal); and 2 ppb for mercury.

While all this is going on, what are parents to do?

Suggestions from Harvard Health

The FDA is working on doing better monitoring and regulation of heavy metals in commercial baby foods. In the meantime, it’s nearly impossible to know which are completely safe and which aren’t. Babies don’t need solid foods until 6 months of age. At that time it’s perfectly fine to give them soft table foods instead of baby foods. You can also make your own baby food, using steamed or naturally soft foods and a blender. (Storage tip: you can pour a homemade puree into an ice cube tray and freeze it, and then just grab the cubes you need each time.)

Suggestions from Healthy Children

Give your child a wide variety of different foods (the more natural colors, the better).
Vary the grains. As mentioned above, it’s best to limit rice and rice products (check labels — rice is in a lot of foods marketed for babies, like “puffs”). Try barley, oats, and other grains. When cooking rice, it’s best to cook it in extra water and drain that water off, and to use white basmati and sushi rice, which have less arsenic.
Check your water. Old pipes can contain lead, which can leach into drinking water.
Avoid fruit juices. Not only can they increase the risk of cavities and obesity, but many commercial juices also contain heavy metals.
Make healthy fish choices. Fish contains nutrients that are very healthy for the developing brain, but some fish can contain unhealthy amounts of mercury. Stay clear of big, predatory, long-living fish like swordfish, shark, or albacore tuna; it’s better to choose fish like cod, light tuna, salmon, or pollock.

In the meantime…

The lawsuits! At least 69 had been filed as of April 29.
The New York Attorney General is also looking into this.

Tags: Children, Kids' diets, Toxins

Mar 9 2021

More on toxic metals in baby foods: FDA on the job!

Early in February I wrote about heavy metal toxins in baby foods. A report, Baby Foods Are Tainted with Dangerous Levels of Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury, revealed:

Arsenic, led, cadmium, and mercury are present in commercial baby foods at levels much higher than considered safe.
Their sources: foods raised on contaminated soil and water, and vitamin/mineral pre-mixes.
Baby food companies set their own safety standards for toxic metals.
The FDA knows baby foods have high levels of toxic metals but isn’t doing anything about it.
Some baby food companies refused to share data on this topic.

Politico has been following this story. It reports:

The FDA launched a working group on toxic food contaminants in 2017, partly in reaction to an earlier EPA study that found food to be a source of about half the lead that kids get (see supplementary material in this paper).
Preventing lead exposure would be good for society as well as for children.

In response to the “Tainted” report, the FDA now says it will set standards.

The FDA wrote baby food manufacturers to shape up. The FDA, it says,

is taking this opportunity to remind all baby and toddler food manufacturers and processors covered by the preventive control provisions of the rule Current Good Manufacturing Practice, Hazard Analysis, and Risk-Based Preventive Controls for Human Food…of your responsibility under the rulemaking to consider chemical hazards that may be present in foods when conducting your hazard analysis….FDA takes exposure to toxic elements in the food supply extremely seriously, especially when it comes to protecting the health and safety of the youngest and most vulnerable in the population.

And the FDA issued a statement to the food industry.

Toxic elements are in the environment, and therefore in the food supply. The levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, and cadmium in certain foods depends on many factors, including: growing conditions; manufacturing and agricultural processes; past or current environmental contamination; and the genetic capacity of food crops to take up elements. We share the public’s concerns for the health of America’s children, and want to reassure parents and caregivers that at the levels we have found through our testing, children are not at an immediate health risk from exposure to toxic elements in foods. The FDA routinely monitors levels of toxic elements in food, and if we find that they pose a health risk, the FDA takes steps to remove those foods from the market.

Research has shown that reducing exposure to toxic elements is important to minimizing any potential long-term effects on the developing brains of infants and children. As such, this issue is among FDA’s highest priorities and we are actively working to make progress on identifying and implementing impactful solutions to make foods commonly consumed by infants and young children safer.

In the meantime, here’s what Beech Nut says on its website.

Toxic heavy metals are not good for babies’ health. Baby food companies need to do much better in getting rid of these things if they want anyone to keep buying their products.

What to do in the meantime? Feed kids small amounts of as wide a variety of foods as possible. That’s good advice anyway.

Tags: Children, FDA, Kids' diets

Feb 9 2021

Uh oh. Baby foods contain toxic metals—arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury

The big news in food politics last week: revelations about toxic metals in baby foods.

This is not a new topic, as I’ve discussed previously with respect to arsenic in rice cereal. Babies should be eating the healthy foods parents eat, just mashed or cut to size so they don’t choke. Commercial baby food is a convenience for sure, but not at the price of babies’ health.

What’s new are these revelations:

Arsenic, led, cadmium, and mercury are present in commercial baby foods at levels much higher than considered safe.
Their sources: foods raised on contaminated soil and water, and vitamin/mineral pre-mixes.
Baby food companies set their own safety standards for toxic metals.
The FDA knows baby foods have high levels of toxic metals but isn’t doing anything about it.
Some baby food companies refused to share data on this topic.

This news comes from, of all places, the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee in a report titled Baby Foods Are Tainted with Dangerous Levels of Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury

The Food and Drug Administration has set the maximum allowable levels in bottled water at 10 ppb inorganic arsenic, 5 ppb lead, and 5 ppb cadmium, and the Environmental Protection Agency has capped the allowable level of mercury in drinking water at 2 ppb. The test results of baby foods and their ingredients eclipse those levels: including results up to 91 times the arsenic level, up to 177 times the lead level, up to 69 times the cadmium level, and up to 5 times the mercury level.

Furthermore,

The Subcommittee has grave concerns about baby food products manufactured by Walmart (Parent’s Choice), Sprout Organic Foods, and Campbell (Plum Organics). These companies refused to cooperate with the Subcommittee’s investigation.

The Subcommittee complains:

Contaminated baby foods do not carry warning labels
Manufacturers do not have to test for heavy metals.
The FDA has only one standard for heavy metals in baby food—a 100 ppb inorganic arsenic standard for infant rice cereal. Even this is too high.

The Subcommittee recommends:

Mandatory testing of baby foods for heavy metals
Mandatory labeling of toxic heavy metals
Voluntary phase-out of toxic ingredients (rice, for example, is high in arsenic)
Mandatory FDA standards for maximum levels of toxic metals in baby foods
Parental vigilance: Avoid commercial baby foods containing toxic heavy metals.

Consumer Reports, which has been complaining about this problem for years (see CR’s 2019 testing of fruit juices and CR’s 2014 tests) , explains:

Heavy metals all are part of the earth’s crust, so they are naturally found in the environment. But most of the heavy metals in food come from soil or water that has been contaminated through either farming and manufacturing practices (such as pesticide application, mining, and smelting) or pollution (such as the use of leaded gasoline).

Its recommendations for parents and caretakers:

Ease up on fruit juice
Consider making your own
Minimize baby food snacks
Vary the foods you feed your child

Its recommendations for the FDA:

Establish aggressive targets
Create and enforce benchmarks
Finalize existing proposed guidelines

Comment: This is a scandal and an emergency. Parents should be warned off baby foods that test high in any of these heavy metals. Now.

Press accounts:

Washington Post: Worth reading for its account of previous reports by Healthy Babies Bright Futures
New York Times: See its account of secret meetings
FoodNavigator: How should the food industry respond?

Update, February 16: the FDA’s response to the congressional report

Tags: Children

Oct 25 2019

Weekend reading: Kid Food (!)

Bettina Elias Siegel. Kid Food: The Challenge of Feeding Children in a Highly Processed World. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Image result for siegel kid food

I did a blurb for this book but it is so good, so well written, and so important that nothing I can say can do it justice.

Everyone who cares about what kids eat must read Bettina Siegel’s fabulous Kid Food. This is a gorgeously written, heartfelt, and deeply compelling manifesto arguing why and how we must do better at feeding our kids more healthfully at home, in schools, and on the soccer field. Kid Food provides the evidence and the resources; it should inspire all of us to get busy and start advocating for better kid-food policies—right now.

The book is a treasure for what it says about feeding kids in America today—an instant classic. Its Appendix alone makes the book a must-have: it lists resources for how to feed kids but also for how to advocate for them.

I could have picked excerpts from anywhere in the book but I’m taking the easy route and quoting from the book’s ending as an example of why this book is so worth reading.

Right now, American children are being shortchanged daily by a diet that feeds but doesn’t nourish, that staves off immediate hunger but opens the door to later disease. The factors leading to this tragic outcome are all too human: naked corporate greed; parental ignorance, confusion, and fatigue; practical necessity, for those who can’t afford healthier food; and, in the case of “treats,” even simple love and affection. Improving the current paradigm will require not just pushing back against powerful corporate interests, but also shifting a deeply entrenched food culture. That’s a very heavy lift, but the difficulty of the task doesn’t make it any less urgent or critical. And the good news is, there is no shortage of opportunities to pitch in.

Tags: Books, Children, Kids' diets

Dec 28 2018

Weekend reading: a kids’ book about cooking—in French

Hélène Laurendeau and Catherine Desforges , illustrated by Stéphanie Aubin. Je Cuisine Avec Toi. Edito, 2018.

Image result for je cuisine avec toi

Here’s a way to teach kids French and cooking at the same time. The book is about cooking as a fun activity for kids, but without recipes. The authors explain:

You get to play with tools, measure ingredients, get dirty, and even lick the spoon at the end…We wanted to teach kids to persevere and to know that the important thing is to enjoy the process, not just the result.

It’s witty and entertaining for parents as well as kids.

The authors are looking for a way to get the book translated into English. If you have any ideas about who can help with that, contact helene@helenelaurendeau.com.

Tags: Books, Children

Aug 27 2018

Childhood poverty is increasing, alas

The proportion of U.S. children living in poverty, says the USDA, is higher than it was before the Great Recession of 2008 and seems to be increasing, particularly in rural areas and the South.

Overall, nearly 20%—one-fifth—of U.S. children were living in poverty, an increase of more than one million children since 2007.

The percentage for rural children is 23.5%.

More than half (56%) of all US counties have high rates of child poverty.

An astonishing 86% of rural counties in the South have high rates.

Mississippi has the highest prevalence of rural child poverty—82% of counties in that state have child poverty rates of 20% or more.

Poverty is not good for health.

We have a lot of work to do.

Tags: Children

Feb 16 2018

Weekend reading for kids: Eat This!

Andrea Curtis. Eat This! How Fast-Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk (and how to fight back). Red Deer Press, 2018.

This, amazingly, is a 36-page toolkit for fighting marketing to kids, with endorsements from Mark Bittman and Jamie Oliver, among others.

As I read it, it’s a manual for teaching food literacy to kids—teaching them how to think critically about all the different ways food and beverage companies try to get kids to buy their products or pester their parents to do so.

The “fighting back” part takes up just two pages, but it suggests plenty of projects that kids can do:

Do taste tests of fast food and the same thing home made. “Which one is more delicious, more expensive, more healthy? Which creates the least amount of waste?”

Watch your favorite show…Mark down how many times you see product placement.”

“Quick: think of all the fast-food mascots you know by name…Who are the mascots aimed at?”

The illustrations are kid-friendly as is the text. I’m guessing this could be used easily with kids from age 8 on.

Tags: Books, Children, Marketing to kids

Search this site