I give my 1-year-old foods with added sugar (and she's fine)
I see too many parents worrying about every gram of added sugar that their child might consume, and forgetting that food is about more than just nutrition.
According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025, children ages 0-23 months old should consume no added sugars. Zero!
The rationale behind this advice is that infants and toddlers have high nutritional needs, so we shouldn’t “crowd out” important nutrients that are critical to their development with added sugars. Additionally, there’s a concern that if we feed kids too much sugar, they’re going to develop a taste preference for those foods because, well, they taste good (arguably better than pureed peas!).
But what about the restrictive mindset created when we give children the message that sugar is “bad” and they can’t have it?
And of course, there’s a lot of fear-mongering about the “ob*sity epidemic.” IMO, we need to shift our focus away from demonizing foods and children’s bodies and spend more time thinking about things like food justice, weight stigma & discrimination, and eating disorder prevention.
Here’s the advice I give to new parents about added sugars:
1. Between 0-6 months, there’s really not much reason for your infant to be having added sugars, since they’re likely not eating solid foods yet (or they’re just beginning to).
Before your child begins eating solids, you’re going to want to stick to breastmilk and/or infant formula as your child’s only source of nutrition.
These little ones are growing rapidly but don’t have very big stomachs, so packing in nutrient-dense breastmilk/infant formula is important.
2. Between 6-12 months, start introducing solid foods, including all the major allergens. Keep foods simple at first, then start to make your infant’s food look more like what’s on your plate (watching for choking hazards, of course). A little added sugar won’t hurt them.
When starting solids, whether you’re using purees, baby-led weaning, or a combined approach, you’re going to want to start with single-ingredient foods and slowly build up to more exciting things.
For example, at 6 months, you may be serving things like roasted sweet potato, pureed pears, iron-fortified oat cereal, etc., but by 12 months, especially once you’ve given your child the major allergens, you’re ready to move on to more combined foods like a veggie omelet, meatball, or banana bread.
My belief is that after a couple of months of starting solids, when your baby is eating foods made with multiple ingredients, it’s okay if one of those ingredients is sugar. Here are some that my kids ate before age 1: strawberry yogurt, cold cereal, waffles/pancakes, apples sauteed with butter/brown sugar/cinnamon, etc.
When my daughter was 11 months old, I took her and my son (3 years old at the time) apple picking.
As is our tradition, after picking our apples we headed to the farm store to purchase apple cider donuts and apple cider so that we could have a little apple-themed picnic. When my daughter saw my son eating a donut, she squealed in excitement and gestured toward the box. I had two choices in that moment: (1) try to distract her and give her something else while the rest of us enjoyed the donuts, or (2) just let her have a donut.
I chose option 2, and we all enjoyed donuts together.
I see too many parents worrying about every gram of added sugar that their child might consume, and forgetting that food is about more than just nutrition. It’s also about connection, traditions, joy, and more. That’s what my daughter got along with her donut.
3. Let your child have cake on their first birthday! (A real cake).
This is when I recommend you begin to loosen the reigns a bit more.
By now your child is nutritionally ready to be weaned from breastfeeding (if that’s what you choose) or switch from infant formula to cow’s milk (or an alternative). They’re likely eating a variety of solid foods. At this stage, I think it’s appropriate to offer some foods with added sugars, especially when the child sees others around them consuming those foods (parents, caregivers, older siblings, cousins, neighbors, etc.).
I’m not suggesting you feed your 1-year-old cookies, chocolate, ice cream, cake, and other fun foods every day, but I am saying that occasionally incorporating these is not a big deal.
Think about the context. Maybe you want to stick to mostly purchasing foods without added sugar for eating on a daily basis (things like plain yogurt or instant oatmeal), and that’s certainly a valid choice. But if the family is going out for ice cream, let your 1-year-old have some too, instead of reaching into your bag and pulling out a pouch of applesauce. If you’re baking cookies and they’re watching you eat them, you should probably be offering them some too. They will be more than okay.