Episode 44: Things to Be Mindful of When Reading Kids' Food Labels

Episode 44: Things to Be Mindful of When Reading Kids' Food Labels

Hey there! As parents, we all want to make the best choices for our children's health. But let's be real, navigating food labels can feel overwhelming at times. In this episode, I'll be sharing some valuable insights on what to look out for when choosing foods for your little ones, especially when it comes to avoiding hidden sugars and picking products that truly nourish their growing bodies.

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Links
https://nourishwithkarina.com/feedingbabies
https://nourishwithkarina.com/3-week-feeding-kids-reset

Highlights:

Introduction (00:00.00)
Parenting Children's Taste Preferences: A Concern (02:26.476)
Pediatric Dietitian's Top Three Tips for Healthy Supermarket Choices for Babies and Toddlers (04:52.44)
Label Reading Tips for Healthy Foods (07:17.07)
Understanding Nutritional Labels in Sauces and Cereals (09:35.692)
Optimal Nutritional Guidelines for Cereals and Muesli Bars (11:55.91
Choosing the Right Chips and Sauces (14:14.604)
Comparing Food Options in the Supermarket (16:40.012)
Masterclass on Food Products for Kids (19:05.292)

Show notes

READ TRANSCRIPT

Show Notes

I've been chatting about food labels all week on various platforms, including a recent TV segment. I'm super excited to condense all that information into this podcast episode just for you.

Key Points Discussed:

1. Understanding Hidden Sugars: Lear how to identify and avoid hidden sugars that often sneak into kids' foods under misleading labels.

2. Top Tips for Choosing Healthy Baby and Toddler Foods: Discover my top three tips for selecting the best products in the supermarket.

3. The Importance of Reading Food Labels: Why it's crucial to check labels carefully and what specific ingredients to watch out for.

4. Regulations and Why They Matter: An overview of current food regulations in Australia and why they might not be as protective as we think.

5. Practical Advice for Parents: How to make informed decisions without spending hours deciphering labels.

I hope this episode helps you feel more confident in your ability to choose the best foods for your children.

Show Notes:

- For nutritious recipes and tips, visit: Nourish with Karina

- Follow me on Instagram: @nourishwithkarina

- Sign up for weekly updates and more tips: Join my community

Thank you for tuning in, and I'll catch you in the next episode!

Introduction (00:00.366)
You're listening to the Easy Feed Podcast, episode number 44, things to be mindful of reading kids food labels. Hi there. I'm Karina Savage and with over 20 years experience feeding children, including my own, I've learnt all the secrets that busy mums need to get their children eating better and actually enjoying healthy foods. So a huge welcome to the Easy Feed Podcast.

Welcome back everyone. hope that you are super well. I'm looking forward to this episode, not only because it's number 44 and four is my favourite number, but I've been talking about labels a lot this week and I'm going to continue talking about, I've got another segment tomorrow morning on TV about label reading. So it was an opportune time to summarise all this discussion of the week into a podcast. And here I am streaming into your ears.

Hopefully it's a helpful episode for you because label reading can be an absolute nightmare sometimes. It can be so confusing. I mean, sometimes even for myself as a pediatric dietitian, I spend way too long in supermarket trying to decipher these food labels, looking through the tons and tons and tons of ingredients and looking at the sodium and looking at the fiber and you know, it can be confusing and it can be a minefield. And especially for someone who's, you know,

a specialist teacher or a mathematician or a lawyer or an engineer, someone who's not trained in nutrition can be a really painful, frustrating experience to try and just find a simple, healthy cereal. So I'm here to firstly, we'll talk a bit about baby and toddler food, and then we'll move on to general foods. Because I talked mainly about baby and toddler food on Channel 7 the other day, based on a study that has come out.

Which is alarming to many, not all, but what it basically tells us is that currently there are many toddler foods on the supermarket shelves that are marketed to us as parents as being healthy, when in fact they're laden with sugar. And the issue is that currently our food regulations allow that. So look, you'll get some people saying, this isn't, you know, it's not a massive deal.

Parenting Children's Taste Preferences: A Concern (02:26.476)
But in my view, it is a big deal because we have a unique and very important opportunity as parents of young children to help shape their lifelong taste preferences. And if we're loading our kids up with sugar from a very young age, that's going to increase their chance of becoming sugar addicts and loving those sugary and salty foods as an adult. And that increases their risk of health problems as an adult.

I know that everyone listening to me, you know, I'm preaching to the converted, you care about health, you want your child to be healthy. And if we are buying these products thinking that they're healthy for our children, we want those quick and easy grabs. We want those convenience foods that say they're healthy. They say no added sugar. They say, you know, fruit and yogurt. And so you grab them thinking that they're healthy for your child when in fact, some of them are worse than chocolate. And so look, it's not all of them. Don't get me wrong.

And often the baby foods actually are a bit better, thank goodness, because they were feeding babies. But a lot of the toddler foods we need to be paying close attention to, to make sure that we're choosing the right choices for our children. Because at the moment, we cannot rely on our food standards, keeping out the bad ones because they're allowed in. The floodgates are open, baby. And we really should be closing those to those sugary, sugary foods.

they are overseas, the overseas regulations are a lot tighter. That's why 78 % of our Australian foods, they tested 309 foods in Australia and 78 % of them failed. And it's because often of the added sugar, sometimes it was to do with other declarations of energy percentage or protein. And there was a little bit of gray area around some of the dairy foods, but I think

At the end of the day, the bottom line is still the same. We need a review of our food standards. We need tighter regulation around this to protect our children, to protect the parents who are trying to nourish the children. So that's really what I talked about two days ago on sunrise. And then tomorrow I'm going to be talking more generally about what to choose on food levels. And I'm going to go through that in a little more detail.

Pediatric Dietitian's Top Three Tips for Healthy Supermarket Choices for Babies and Toddlers (04:52.44)
But before I do, I just wanted to summarize a little bit about what I did talk about the other day and to my community that I email out every week, you would have received a summary today from me on what I talked about on Wednesday. And if you follow me on Instagram, then you would have seen my reel about it as well. Be sure to jump on my email database and you can do so by heading to my website, nourishedwithkarina .com. Head to the bottom of the...

first page and you'll see a little box and you can pop in new details there so that you get my updates and you can keep up to date with all the latest nutrition info around feeding kids as well. So I did send a summary out, but I will just give you a little bit of a top three tips whilst we're here chatting today. So my top three tips as a pediatric dietitian for choosing healthy options in the supermarket for babies and toddlers.

would be to number one, choose products with real food ingredients. And by that, I mean whole foods, so apple, pear, oats, wheat, dates, coconut, cocoa, rice, corn, seeds, nuts, grains. You know, all of those foods are real foods. All of those ingredients, I should say, are real foods. Okay. It's not concentrated fruit paste or glycerin or, know, you can actually pick it off a tree or pull it out the ground. Right.

So I'll pick it off a plant. So real food, that's what we're looking for. So that's my number one. My number two is avoid the word sugar and anything meaning sugar or hidden sugar. And hidden sugar at the moment is a, a controversial one, but the food manufacturers with our current regulations can get away with adding in concentrated fruit paste, concentrated fruit juice, fruit juice, concentrate purees like it's

They changed the names around, but basically wherever you see concentrated, that means it's been concentrated up to the point where it's no longer representative of the apple that it came from. So that is a hidden sugar. And at the moment, some of those food products are allowed to say no added sugar because it originally came from the apple when it's nothing like golden as in the apple. this is a real issue. And this is one of the things that I hope will change in the future.

Label Reading Tips for Healthy Foods (07:17.07)
So my number two is avoid the word sugar or the hidden sugar. So where you see concentrated fruit paste or fruit juice concentrate, that's an added sugar. So leave it on the shelf. Number three, check the label per hundred grams and choose products with a sugar less than 10 grams per hundred grams. This is for babies and toddlers. Look, if it's an apple puree, it's all going to be a hundred percent apple.

that's going to be a lot higher per 100 grams. And that's okay, because it's all from the fruit sugar, because fruit sugar is also included in the sugars line as is the milk sugar, which makes it a little confusing. So if it's just fruit or just milk, but basically then it would just be like pouring milk out the carton, then that's different because it's the fruit sugar or the milk sugar and it's the whole apple. Well, it's the apple that's been cooked up. It's not a concentrate. Okay.

If it is a bar or something like a baby mum -mum, then ideally aim for less than 10 grams of sugar per 100 grams. And I'll tell you, there is a mum -mum out there that's got 13 grams of sugar per 100 grams, believe it or not. It's a carrot one. And you would never think that it would be a sugary food. 13 grams of sugar isn't necessarily a sugary food, but it's still too much sugar. We don't need that sugar in

like a wafery rice crackery meltable, I guess you would call it for, you know, babies and toddlers. So just be really mindful, check the ingredients list and then also look at the sugars per hundred grams and aim for less than 10. So they were my top three tips that I have been talking about for the past few days. And of course I've got lots more.

detailed conversation that occurs in my master classes and in my conversations with my members inside Nourishing Kids, but there's a little taste for you. If we move on now to what I will be talking about tomorrow morning, and of course I'll try and share the recording once I've got that, but what I'm going to be talking about tomorrow morning is more general label reading and some guidance around label reading for household products, such as cereals. We're going to talk about yogurt, muesli bars.

Understanding Nutritional Labels in Sauces and Cereals (09:35.692)
sauces, like, you know, saute sauce, jar sauces, tomato -based sauces, and chips. Everybody's favorite. Well, unless you're a chocoholic. So I'm going to be talking about those in the morning. But again, when you're reading labels for sauces and cereals, sometimes it can be really confusing and hard to know what to look for. Like, do we look for saturated fat? Do we look at salt? What's more important in cereals and what's more important for sauces? Like, what do you look for?

So I'm going to go through a few things now just to simplify it for you. So if we use those five categories that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow and actually going to group them together into cereals and muesli bars, because for both of those like whole grainy products or ideally whole grainy products, what I encourage you to look for per 100 grams, because then you can compare apples with apples.

pardon the pun, like, you know, not talking about necessarily apples now, but apples with apples. You're not comparing apples with oranges. When you look per hundred grams, you're comparing the same thing because often the serve size vary. So if you're comparing per serve, you might be comparing a 30 gram serve in one product with a 45 gram serve in another. That's very common in cereals. They vary. And then you don't know what they actually would be if you compared them, you know,

with exactly the same weight, because then you've got to do the calculations for 35, how you get to 45 and, you know, multiply that fraction up. And no one's going to do that at the supermarket, unless you are a mathematician. So comparing per hundred grams means that you can then look at the product per hundred grams that you can easily compare. Okay. Like for like. So for cereals and muesli bars, I would look at the total sugar per hundred grams. And I would ideally keep that less than 50.

Okay. Not always possible. Ideally is possible and things like oats are 0 % sugar and wheat bix is like 3 % sugar. Cocoa pops and Nutri -Grain, you know, you're up in the high 20s or 30s. So ideally less than 15 grams of sugar per 100 grams. And that's the cereals and muesli bars. Muesli bars, sometimes it's hard to get under 20, I must say. Fiber, you also want to look at. And fiber is the opposite.

Optimal Nutritional Guidelines for Cereals and Muesli Bars (11:55.918)
The higher, the better. Ideally, you want it above 10 per hundred grams. Some of them you will get higher. Some of them you get 15 or more. Amazing. Not always. So with cereals and muesli bars, I've been looking at the sugar, aiming for less than 15 grams per hundred grams and looking at fibre and aiming for ideally 10 or more grams per hundred grams. Okay. So that's those grainy cereals, muesli bar types.

foods. If we move on to yogurts, yogurts are slightly different because you need to look per hundred meals, not per hundred grams. So you just go to the per hundred meals because it's a liquid. But the same thing, you would compare per hundred meals rather than per serve. Now with yoghurt, I think it's important to look at two things, the saturated fat and the sugar.

With the saturated fat, would want that less than three grams per hundred mils. With the sugar, ideally you would aim for less than 10 grams per hundred mils. Now this isn't always going to be possible. It definitely will be with some of the really good quality baby and toddler yogurts that literally have no added sugar, but just know that the

lactose, so the natural milk sugar, just like the natural fruit sugar, it will appear in the sugars line and you don't know how much of it has come from lactose compared to added sugar, unless you know naturally how much lactose is in that yogurt, but it's very hard to know. So really at the end of the day, ideally you compare per hundred for yogurts and look for less than 10 grams of sugar per hundred mils and less than three grams of saturated fat per hundred mils.

Let's just keep it simple. Okay. Moving now on to crisps or potato chips. With this product, I think it's important to not only look at the nutrition table, but also the ingredients list. Because with chips, there's huge variation in terms of what goes into those chips. And I think it's really important to keep it as simple as possible.

Choosing the Right Chips and Sauces (14:14.604)
So for example, with some brands of potato chips, the Tyrell brand or the Kettle brand, there's three ingredients in the plain version. it's potatoes, sunflower oil or canola oil and salt. Okay. So that's a good outcome. Whereas there are some that are loaded with additives, preservatives, flavor enhancers. Those ones are a much poorer choice.

But often they're the tastier ones because they've got those flavourings and often they're higher in salt as well. So with chips, I would be inclined to look at the ingredients list and try and keep the ingredients list as short as possible. And then I would look at the salt per hundred grams and compare the salt. And you'll be astounded. Some chips, you can actually get the salt pretty low. You can get the salt down to, I think around 350 milligrams per hundred grams, which is pretty impressive.

Whereas others, especially the salt and vinegar style, are up the 8th, 900. So have a look next time you're in the chip aisle and look at the chips that you like, and then try and find a similar one and just compare it. Look at the ingredients list, see which one has a shorter or longer ingredients list, and look at the sodium per hundred grams. Ideally in a perfect world, we're choosing products that are less than 350 milligrams of sodium per hundred grams.

Not always possible in chips. You don't eat chips because they're low in salt. But if you like a chip and it has slightly lower sodium content, then great, go for that one. It's still fried potato, right? So if you can just have a little less salt, then that's a good thing. Okay. Moving on to sauces now. So with sauces, I'm actually going to be talking about, well, two things. First of all, you've got your tomato sauces and your barbecue sauces.

And then you've got your sauces like your satay sauces, your ready -made sort of chicken tonight sauces. So all of those will have varying degrees of sugar and salt. And that's where I think you really need to be focusing your attention. So looking at the, again, per hundred, looking at the salt, looking at the sugar and with the sugar, keeping it under 10, with the salt, keeping it under 350. Now, again, not always possible.

Comparing Food Options in the Supermarket (16:40.012)
But if you like a satay and there's two options on the supermarket shelf, pick them up, spin them around and compare the salt and the sugar per a hundred meals and see where you land. The other thing that you can look at is the ingredients list because you know, for some people additives and preservatives are a big concern and you will find additives and preservatives and colours and flavours in these products. And so that's another thing that I would look at when I'm comparing sources. So look at the salt, look at the sugar.

And look at the ingredients list. And as I always say, try and keep it as simple as possible or as short as possible. So short as possible means, you know, three or four ingredients. Amazing. Now you're not going to get that in the sauce. You're going to have more generally, like if it was a satay sauce, but for example, if it was a tomato based sauce or a barbecue sauce, then yeah, the simpler, the better. I always like to say that if you don't know the name of the food ingredient or your grandmother,

wouldn't know the name of the ingredient, then it's best to leave that food product on the shelf because goodness knows what it's going to do inside your body. So try to purchase foods that have ingredients that you actually recognise. Okay, I'm going to wrap it up there, but I hope that that's given you a little insight, a little clarity around what to look for when you're next in the supermarket. Look, there is a lot more devil in the detail, especially when you're talking about fruit.

in breakfast cereals and fruit in muesli bars. And you know, when you're looking at dairy products, as I said, you've got that natural milk sugar in the sugars line as well. Natural fruit sugars and natural milk sugars naturally, not naturally, they go in that sugars line. I would love the food manufacturers to separate them out so that you can see the added sugar and the milk sugar. I don't know why they can't do that, but you know, it's still not there. We really just need that big review of our food standards as I keep talking about. Bananas!

we press on and as I said, I'm here to help spread the word about how we can better read labels so that we can make really informed, healthy choices for ourselves and for our children. So if you've got a food product that you would like me to review, then please reach out to me on Instagram or Facebook or send me an email. Better still join Nourishing Kids because then you will have basically the food review instantly on tap inside our chat group.

Masterclass on Food Products for Kids (19:05.292)
And I've just recorded another masterclass on a whole lot of food products, baby and toddler food products. And I've reviewed those that has gone up inside my label reading module inside Nourishing Kids. So please check that out. If you're wanting to know more, it's nourishwithkarina .com forward slash membership. And we'd love to have you in that. It's such a fun group. We're now connecting fortnightly. So yeah, we have question and answer sessions. We talk about all sorts of stuff and it's very helpful and, and lots of fun.

very supportive, so no judgment, no judgment whatsoever. Because beating kids is damn hard and sometimes you just need that little bit of encouragement and reassurance that you are going in the right direction. So I'm here to help. Anyway, I'll wrap it up. I hope you have a beautiful week and we will chat soon. Bye for now.