What do mums really think about sugar?
Wee Fingers recently hosted a Tweetchat all about sugar — how to cut it down in our kids diets, what mums think about sweeteners and ‘natural sugars’, what snacks they give their kids and what foods they’ve been surprised to find have a lot more sugar in them than they thought.
We started off by seeing how many of the mums knew what the maximum amount of sugar was that their 4–6 year olds should be eating. And they got it 100% right — the answer is 19g/5 sugar cubes — so these were some pretty well informed mums — and perhaps this also shows that the message to cut down sugar is getting out there. But how easy is it to actually do that?
Everyone was surprised/shocked by how easy it is to hit that 19g. So how do they go about trying to keep an eye on their kids’ sugar intake?
We asked the mums what they tend to give their kids as snacks, to try and keep sugar levels down. Our big winners have definitely been banana bread, home made low sugar muffins, sugar free jelly and funny fruit shapes. These are some of the snacks the mums in the chat give to their kids.
Nuts, fruit and crackers were all popular options as well as home made bakes like muffins and pancakes. One mum had cut right down on any snacks other than fruit. I asked her how she did it and maybe I need to go down that route to really cut the sugar right down. Mum stubborness may be the answer!!
We also talked about how much sugar there is in ready made food. Whilst I’ve been trying to cut down on Wee Finger’s sugar I started really checking labels and realised ready made pasta sauces, soups (even fresh ones) and ‘healthy’ snacks like YoYos have a LOT of sugar in them.
The mums pointed out that most sauces, dips, petit filous, cereal and even food for babies like Heinz baby biscuits have high levels of sugar in them. Plus it lurks in savoury snacks like flavoured crisps. It seems to be everywhere and often marketed on so called ‘healthy’ products using the claim ‘no added sugar’. Everyone agreed that it’s really hard to cut the sugar down when the go to snacks aimed at children actually have huge amounts of sugar in them.
Next up we talked about whether we preferred to use the so called ‘natural sugars’ to refined cane sugar or sweeteners. The majority of the mums preferred to sweeten with honey or maple syrup as they felt it at least offered something of nutritious value. Another mum trained as a nutritionist (Charlotte Stirling-Reed) though said that actually they’re no better — and you’d have to eat ALOT of them to get any benefit.
I think the message here is that people are confused about what is better to use, not helped by all the celebrity cook books claiming they feature no sugar recipes when they actually use things like honey and maple syrup quite liberally.
My thoughts on it are that I still prefer to use honey and maple syrup as they seem less refined, and I feel like I can use less of them. I prefer to sweeten cakes using these and halve the quantities rather than using artificial sweeteners. However I have found some more natural sweeteners like Xylitol which seem to be okay for you and are apparently good for your teeth.
Lastly, we offered each other tips on how to go about cutting down sugar in our kids diets. I’ve definitely found that by making a lot more of our own food like soups, pasta sauces and muffins, it’s been much easier to keep the sugar intake down. We also mostly avoid cereals and things like fruit yoghurts and juices.
We got some great suggestions — the top of which were to cook from scratch, eat ‘real’ food — ie fruit and vegetables and avoid processed food as much as possible. We also noted some of the challenges like other role models (dads, grandparents!!) in kids lives maybe not modelling ideal food behaviour!
In conclusion I think I can safely say that mums are really interested in finding ways to cut down the sugar in their kids diets, but find it challenging and also at times confusing.
Some of the thoughts I had as a result of the chat is that food labelling really needs to be addressed. Everyone seemed to be confused by the ‘no added sugar’ claims and also about ‘free’ sugars which aren’t currently listed out separately on labels — these are the ones we need to watch so it makes sense to know how much are in a product.
They’re also not sure what sugars to use, often choosing more ‘natural’ sugars like honey over refined white sugar and thinking that is better. Mostly avoiding artificial sweeteners as they feel they’re chemically made and so can’t be good for you. Some clear public health information on this would be really useful I think.
I also wondered about the marketing of sweets, cereals and snacks to children — they’re always packaged so brightly, using fun characters, play cards or stickers and interesting shapes — it’s very hard to make home cooked food quite as fun. So maybe this needs to be considered.
And I also think more needs to be done about the amount of sugar food manufacturers put into food — especially weaning products — as it can’t be good to set kids up with a sweet tooth. It’s great that some work is being done on this but more and sooner would be good.
One mum’s solution was to only give fruit for snacks — this is great — and what I aspire to — but it’s hard. The easier this can be made the better. For instance shops like Tesco let kids take fruit for free when shopping there and some school authorities only allow fruit for desserts or snacks.
Yes it’s up to every parent to try and ensure their kids diet is healthy, but a little help from the environment in which they live wouldn’t go amiss either.
I’d love to hear what you think about sugar, any tips you have or questions. Feel free to message me here or on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook @weefingersfood.
