Читать книгу Eat Up: Food for Children of All Ages - Mark Hix - Страница 24

Food additives have been associated with skin complaints, behavioural problems, asthma and many other medical conditions in young children, who are particularly vulnerable to them. Avoiding additives completely is difficult – the only way is to make sure that everything your child eats is fresh and unprocessed. Though having an E number means that an ingredient has passed certain EU safety tests, it doesn’t mean that it is any good for us or our children. Colours, preservatives, antioxidants, stabilisers, flavour enhancers, glazing agents and artificial flavourings should all be avoided if possible. Even products that come with reassuring health claims such as ‘no artificial colours or preservatives’ may well contain artificial flavourings. ‘No added sugar’ may mean the product contains chemical sweeteners such as saccharin or aspartane, which are banned from foods for children under twelve months and have been linked with serious health problems. When shopping for food, the best strategy is to read the label and go for products that contain a short list of identifiable ingredients. Avoid anything you don’t recognise as food – for example, acidity regulator, glucono delta-lactone or maltodextrin. You and your children definitely don’t need these in your diet.

Sugar and salt are added to many processed foods unnecessarily so that children (and adults) will find them more palatable. Sugar can be associated with behavioural problems, so if your child is sensitive to it, avoid processed foods. It may be deceptively labelled under many other names such as sucrose, glucose, fructose, glucose syrup and corn syrup. Fructose, the natural sugar present in fruit, is slowly absorbed as energy when eaten in fruit but if it is separated from the fruit fibre and turned into, say, a fruit-flavoured drink, it is absorbed like any refined sugar. Honey and brown sugar have healthier connotations but they too are absorbed in exactly the same way as refined sugar so they do not present an acceptable alternative.