Top tips for reducing kids sugar intake

If you’re hoping to get your family fit and healthy in 2015, start with looking at sugar intake.

A new government campaign is urging parents to reduce the amount of sugar kids consume in order to safeguard their future health.

The Change4Life campaign ‘Sugar Swaps’ is offering email packs, videos and even text reminders to help you reduce your child’s sugar.

So if your children are still sluggish after too much Christmas sugar you might just want to take this challenge on.

Here are our top tips:

1. Check the labels.

Many ‘healthy’ foods such as baked beans are full of sugar. Even 100% all natural fruit bars are high in fruit sugar. Choose foods with less than 5g per 100g, which is classed as low sugar. Choose ‘greens’ and ‘ambers’ more than ‘reds’ on colour-coded nutrition labels.

2. Learn different types of sugars.

There are many different words to describe sugar. Look out for sucrose, maltose, fructose, invert sugar, corn syrup and even honey.

3. Encourage exercise.

If kids are bored, they are tempted to snack on junk, so get them moving instead. Exercise also stimulates appetites so kids are less likely to be picky about wholesome meals.

4. Plan your snacks and meals.

Planning to have wholegrain bread and cherry tomatoes for lunch means they will be purchased and go in the lunchboxes!  After school, snacks of rice cakes, savoury crackers with dips and vegetable sticks can also be prepared ahead.

5. Do more baking.

If you bake biscuits and cakes yourself you can control the amount of sugar in them. Use mashed banana, grated apple or dried fruit to add sweetness with some nutrition.

6. Swap the drinks.

Most added sugar in the diet of 4 – 10 year olds come from drinks. Instead of squash, fizzy drinks and fruit and fruit shoots, encourage plain water, diluted fruit juice and milk.