
Babies don’t have a sweet tooth, so why is their food full of sugar? - pseudolus
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/03/babies-sweet-food-sugar-childhood-obesity-industry
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jazoom
I haven't read the article, but babies like sugar more than anyone I've ever
seen before. In fact, when doing procedures to a baby like inserting a
cannula, we often give them a tiny tube of sugar water to suck on. You can
then do pretty much anything you like to them and they don't even notice.
They're too busy voraciously sucking out every last molecule of sucrose.

By the way, I've tasted that sugar water, and it isn't even all that
concentrated.

It also works if they're sucking on a breast, but it doesn't look like they've
just discovered the best thing in the world in that case.

Edit: I just thought I'd clarify (it's not the sucking itself) that when I
said they suck on a tube of sugar, it's more like someone is occasionally
placing a drop of the stuff on their lip. That keeps them occupied for about
30 seconds at a time. There's less than 1mL of liquid in those tubes, so it'd
be gone in a few seconds if we let them suck on it straight away.

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satya71
As you said that sugar water is not very concentrated. But baby food tends to
be excessively sweet, almost dessert-like. I have struggled with this first
hand as a parent.

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jazoom
But babies obviously love sugar, so this title is ridiculous. Just because you
don't love dipping a moist steak in a tub of salt doesn't mean you don't love
salty foods. That's too much of a good thing.

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tracker1
Hell, half the time, when I suggest that people should avoid sugar, someone
says, "but, people need sugar to survive." How do you correct decades of
disinformation?

If I could estimate the top 3 causes for disease in modern western culture it
would be Refined Sugar (high fructose intake), Low Fat Diets (too little for a
healthy body) and Refined Vegetable Oils (linoleic acid leads to increased
intake of carbs). All centered around diet.

The standard of care, of course is to prescribe medications that lower markers
for several diseases even if it doesn't help the causes for the elevated
markers, exacerbates the problems, and has worse mortality.

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pseudolus
I'm unsure if it's true and haven't come across any data backing up the claim
but I was once told that babies don't necessarily enjoy salty food. However,
manufacturers would add salt to the food in the expectation that parents would
pre-taste it, project their own preference for salt, and then not purchase the
same brand of baby food again if it didn't meet their own personal "saltiness"
expectations.

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Swenrekcah
While that may be true, everything I have seen has told me to absolutely not
give my baby salty food.

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jc_mc
The recommendation in the UK for babies under 1 is super low, like under 1g a
day or something.

I always pre-tasted my kid's food, however the result of this is not that he
ate more salt, but that I now eat significantly less.

Then again, I cook. The kid eats what we eat, and that is very rarely
processed/packaged food for either toddlers or adults.

