Children's food dismissed as 'junk'

The survey said children's diets are being undermined

By BBC consumer affairs correspondent Nicola Carslaw

Most children's food on the market is junk, according to a survey by the independent food watchdog.

The Food Commission found that for every healthy product targeted specifically at children 10 more were "nutritional disasters".

If manufacturers were trying to undermine children's health, they could hardly be more effective

Dr Tim Lobstein, Food Commission

The report pulls no punches, hitting out hard at the food industry.

It accuses manufacturers of undermining children's diets by boosting the sugar, fat, additives and salt content of their food, over-processing and removing the nutrients and dietary fibre.

The Food Commission's researchers studied 358 regular products with cartoon characters, puzzles, gifts and other devices designed to attract children.

Barbie cookies were tested

Excluded from the survey were crisps, confectionery and soft drinks - these would be well-known to parents as high in fat or sugar.

It also gave the manufacturers a fair chance to show that they could provide good nutrition.

The children's food ranged from cheese spreads and seedless raisins, to cocoa cereals and Barbie cookies.

The Food Commission found that a third of the 358 products were so poorly labelled that no nutritional assessment could be made.

Definition of junk food

Total fat - more than 20g

Saturated fat - more than 5g

Sugars - more than 10g

Sodium (salt) - more than 0.5g

Of the rest, only 7% had low levels of saturated fat, sugar and salt. The overwhelming majority, 77%, had high levels.

Among the products singled out as particularly poor were Safeway Banana Chips.

The commission thought fruit wrapped in cartoon-covered packaging was a great idea ruined, because Safeway had added fat (a whopping 30% of the final product) plus extra honey and sugar.

Yeo Valley's Crazy Creatures yoghurt contained 25% sugar - the equivalent, says the Food Commission, of five teaspoons of sugar per pot.

Safeway banana chips were criticised

In contrast, only four products - 1% of the total - declared their nutritional content and were low in fats, sugar and salt. These were frozen vegetables with children's cartoons on them.

Dr Karla Fitzhugh, one of the report's authors, believes one of the worst things is that parents often have no way of knowing what they are buying.

"Over one-third of the foods were not labelled in a way that we could make sense of the nutritional content, and if a trained nutritionist cannot do that, I don't see how a parent could do that," she said.

She wants to see the food retailers and producers introduce more detailed labelling, spelling out a product's fat content.

The Food Commission's Tom Lobstein said: "There is a huge opportunity to promote healthy foods using all the marketing tricks of the trade. Instead, we are seeing unhealthy ones being promoted, at a ratio of more than 10 to one."

Safeway's director of communications, Kevin Hawkins, said retailers never aimed to mislead consumers about the healthiness of any product.

One manufacturer accused in the report of using cartoon characters to attract children to buy a product high in saturated fat said his company was constantly reviewing the contents of its food.

But it stressed that sweet snacks were designed to be eaten as special treats and parents had the chance to ration them accordingly.