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More than 18 percent of elementary school children in the United States are obese and no one knows why; the causes are varied and complex. But, in general, it is accepted that consuming a lot of sugar is an important factor. In 2015, the World Health Organization issued a recommendation: everyone, regardless of age, should limit their sugar intake to less than ten percent of the total calories that they consume daily.
In young children, this would mean no more than 45 grams of sugar a day. Of course, very few young children are responsible for their own food or can monitor their sugar intake. This care is almost always the responsibility of one of the parents. A recent study published in the International Journal of Obesity suggests that most of us surprise! We are not experts in calculating the amount of sugar in some common foods.
For the study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, they visited 305 German families in which there was at least one child aged 6 to 12 years old. The body mass index of each child was measured, and the parent who planned and offered the most meals as a family – almost always the mother, but not always – completed a simple questionnaire on the computer .
Parents who calculate the sugar content of various beverages and foods, such as orange juice, yogurt, pizza or ketchup, which are very common in the diets of young children. To help parents visualize sugar volumes, they were asked to think in terms of cubes of sugar and were told that each cube contained about three grams of sugar.
Nearly 75% of fathers were underestimated the total sugar content in foods, in some cases quite considerably. The largest differences were observed in foods considered "healthy": more than 90% of participants thought that the amount of sugar in yogurt was lower, for example seven cubes on average, or nearly 60 cubits. percent of total sugar in each serving. Most disturbingly, these errors were found to be related to the body weight of children: children with the highest body mass index tended to be the children of those who had made the greatest miscalculation.
is a correlational study, the results do not prove that children gain weight if their parents are wrong in the amount of sugar in pizza, for example, or in ketchup (it turns out that all parents overestimated the sugar content of ketchup). Nevertheless, the conclusions warn against the need to pay attention.
"We were surprised at the degree of underestimation of the sugar content of some products," said Mattea Dallacker, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute. with Ralph Hertwig and Jutta Mata. Dallacker and his colleagues suspect that there is a "healthy halo" on products like fruit juice and yogurt, which causes parents to miscalculate their sugar content.
Dallacker says that he would like to see food labels will include a "traffic light system": a red dot to indicate the high sugar content and a green dot for the minimum sugar content. Until this happens, it suggests that parents soften the food by themselves.
"Mix plain yogurt with fruit," says Dallacker. "Parents who do this will hardly feel the need to add eleven cubes of sugar."
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