Nearly half of all the calories that toddlers eat in the United Kingdom come from ultra-processed food, according to recent research, and this number rises to 59 percent among 7-year-olds.
"Eating patterns in the early years are important, as they help set habits that can persist through childhood and into adulthood," said senior author Professor Clare Llewellyn, from University College London (UCL)'s Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care, in a statement.
Eating more ultra-processed food has been linked to a higher risk of developing diet-related diseases, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.
"This is concerning, as infants and young children who gain weight too fast are also more likely to carry excess weight into their adolescent and adult life," Vicky Sibson, director of the First Steps Nutrition Trust (FSNT), told Newsweek.
However, Llewellyn told Newsweek: "We know very little about the consumption of these foods among very young children. It is important to understand consumption patterns in this age group, as a first step before undertaking epidemiological [observations about public health] research linking individual differences in toddlers' intakes with health outcomes."
A group of scientists, led by researchers at UCL, analyzed data from 2,591 children born in the U.K. between 2007 and 2008.
These were children involved in the Gemini twin cohort study, whose parents had filled out three-day food diaries when the children were 21 months old and 7 years old.
The scientists analyzed these diaries using the NOVA classification, the standard used to define ultra-processed foods as one of four categories: unprocessed or minimally processed foods, such as eggs, milk, vegetables and fruit; processed culinary ingredients, such as salt, butter and oil; processed foods, such as tinned fish, homemade bread, and cheese; and ultra-processed foods (UPF), such as chips, store-bought cookies, sliced bread and breakfast cereals.
"A simple way of looking at it is that UPFs are typically packaged foods made in factories, usually comprised of a long list of ingredients, including those that you wouldn't usually find in your kitchen cupboard," said Sibson.
In 2023, the FSNT produced a report that said that children aged 2 to 5 in the U.K. got an average of 61 percent of their calorie intake from UPF, but Sibson said this number had probably risen since the study's data was collected 10 years ago.
"It is worse in the U.K. than other countries," said Sibson. "The statistic that 61 percent of the total mean energy intake of 2 to 5-year-olds comes from UPF in the U.K., compared to 58 percent in the U.S., 47 percent in Australia and only 18 percent in Colombia."
The UCL scientists divided the children in their study into five groups, depending on how much UPF they ate.
They found that toddlers in the group that consumed the lowest amount of UPF got 28 percent of their dietary calories from UPF, and toddlers at the other extreme ate a 69 percent UPF diet, on average.
Most of the UPF that the toddlers consumed came from sources that are generally believed to be healthier, such as breakfast cereals and flavored yogurts.
"These provide valuable nutrients, such as fiber and calcium, but many also contain too much sugar and salt," Llewellyn told Newsweek. "More research is needed to understand what it is about UPFs that are harmful—i.e. is it the nutritional profile of the foods, in which case some UPFs are fine, or is it the processing itself, or the additives."
Recent research has indicated that "healthier" sources of UPF might not have the same detrimental effects as more obviously unhealthy forms of UPF, such as store-bought cookies.
However, the UCL researchers found that children who ate the most UPF as toddlers were 9.4 times more likely to end up in the highest UPF intake group at age 7—at which point the most common UPF sources included sweet breakfast cereals, white bread and desserts.
Previous research has shown that young children's diets can predict the foods they gravitate toward later; eating more vegetables in early childhood, for example, seems to encourage more vegetable eating as the child grows up.
"Especially in early childhood, 'real' minimally processed nutritious food is important because—as well as getting the nutrients they need to grow, develop and stay healthy—babies and young children need to learn to chew and swallow and develop the muscles and physical capacity to eat," said Sibson.
"They also need to learn the taste of real foods and to develop healthy preferences, importantly not just for sweet foods and drinks.
"A daily diet of smooth shop-bought baby purees, crispy baby snacks, baby desserts, etc., might go some way towards meeting the nutrient needs of the child—albeit with far too much sugar—but that diet will not help him or her learn the physical act of eating or prepare them for the taste of a healthy family meal made from real foods."
The UCL scientists found that toddlers involved in the study, in all five categories of UPF consumption, were eating too much sugar—defined as more than the maximum recommended by the U.K. government: 5 percent of daily calories.
But, in the two groups where toddlers consumed the most UPF, their added sugar intake was more than 10 percent of daily calories, on average.
"Ultra-processed foods are not all bad for our health, and the foods typically eaten by the toddlers in our study are ones that are seen as quite healthy," said lead author Rana Conway from the UCL Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care in a statement.
"However, some wholegrain cereals and flavored yogurts have high levels of added sugar and salt, and our study found that toddlers who consumed more ultra-processed foods also had a higher intake of these ingredients."
Seven-year-olds who ate more UPF were also more likely to consume high quantities of salt and sugar, and their UPF intake was associated with eating less fiber.
Sibson said that parents could improve their children's diets by serving mainly nutritious, unprocessed and minimally processed foods made mainly from scratch.
"Children would benefit from consuming more whole foods, such as fruits and vegetables, and whole grains, so focusing on making this shift, rather than trying to read and make sense of ingredients labels of processed foods, is an easier thing for parents to focus on," said Llewellyn.
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References
Conway, R. E., Heuchan, G. N., Heggie, L., Rauber, F., Lowry, N., Hallen, H., Llewellyn, C. H. (2024). Ultra-processed food intake in toddlerhood and mid-childhood in the UK: cross sectional and longitudinal perspectives, European Journal of Nutrition. http://doi.org/10.1007/s00394-024-03496-7
Spill, M. K., Johns, K., Callahan, E. H., Shapiro, M. J., Wong, Y. P., Benjamin-Neelon, S. E., Birch, L., Black, M. M., Cook, J. T., Faith, M. S., Mennella, J. A., & Casavale, K. O. (2019). Repeated exposure to food and food acceptability in infants and toddlers: A systematic review. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 109, 978S-989S. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqy308
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