Parents may assume toddler foods meet special nutrition standards. A new audit found four in five products were ultra-processed.<\/p>\n
Parents reach for pouches, puffs, and little tubs of mac and cheese in the toddler aisle. Nothing on that shelf has to meet a nutrition standard written for toddlers.<\/p>\n
In a new audit of the aisle, four out of five products were ultra-processed. About half went over at least one World Health Organization limit for sugar, salt, fat, or calories.<\/p>\n
Erin A. Hudson<\/a> ran the audit as a doctoral candidate in the University of Texas (UT) at Austin\u2019s Department of Nutritional Sciences<\/a>. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at Children\u2019s Hospital Los Angeles<\/a>. She took the findings to a nutrition meeting in July, ahead of any journal paper.<\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately, parents have to be really diligent about checking the nutrition content of foods that are marketed for toddlers, particularly the sugar content,\u201d Hudson said in an Earth.com interview.<\/p>\n Toddler foods lack nutrition standards<\/p>\n The United States sets no nutrient standards for toddler food, so researchers grade the aisle against a European model. The World Health Organization (WHO<\/a>) office for Europe published one in 2022.<\/p>\n It caps sugar, sodium, fat, and calories per ounce by product type, for children aged 6 months to 3 years. Nothing binds an American company to these limits. In a 2024 audit, 60% of 651 American baby foods<\/a> fell short<\/a> of the same model.<\/p>\n Hudson conducted the research with Marissa Burgermaster, who runs a nutrition lab at UT Austin.<\/p>\n Most toddler foods were ultra-processed<\/p>\n Their team photographed the baby and toddler aisles of 21 grocery stores around Austin, Texas, including national chains and regional ones. <\/p>\n They pulled each product\u2019s nutrition facts and ingredients off the stores\u2019 websites. That came to 2,783 products in 11 categories. The researchers excluded infant formula, drinks, and babies\u2019 first purees.<\/p>\n Ultra-processed foods<\/a> are industrial mixtures of refined starches, oils, isolated proteins, and additives, not food you\u2019d cut on a board. The team sorted every product with Nova, the standard system for grading how processed a food is, and 81% came out ultra-processed.<\/p>\n Across all the products, 49% of them went over at least one WHO limit.<\/p>\n \u201cMany parents may assume that products sold on the baby\/toddler food aisles of their grocery stores have to meet certain nutrient standards,\u201d Hudson said.<\/p>\n Sugary products were usually ultra-processed<\/p>\n Sugar was the one place where processing and nutrition lined up. Products that were over the WHO sugar limit had about four times the odds of being ultra-processed when compared with products under the limit.<\/p>\n In total, 17% of foods on the aisle went over the sugar limit. Fruit pouches exceeded the sugar limit, while oat bars exceeded the limits for sugar and calories.<\/p>\n The foods children eat as toddlers can shape their taste preferences later. In addition, too much sugar in childhood<\/a> can harm children\u2019s health.<\/p>\n Added sugar is the only sugar a label has to flag. Asked by Earth.com what parents should do in the aisle, Hudson said to start by skipping any toddler foods that list it.<\/p>\n Hudson said, \u201cBut it is not just added sugar; a lot of the sugar in these products comes from fruit purees and fruit juice concentrates, which drive the sugar content up but may not have to be disclosed as added sugar.\u201d<\/p>\n Fruit juice concentrate is juice from which manufacturers remove the water. She said fruit juice concentrate can sweeten products like sugar without manufacturers always having to declare it as added sugar. <\/p>\n High-fat products were often less processed<\/p>\n Products over the WHO limits for fat or calories per ounce were less likely to be ultra-processed, not more. Across all the products, 11% exceeded the limit for fat and 12% for calories per ounce.<\/p>\n Hudson told Earth.com that the ingredient lists explain those two results. \u201cI was initially surprised that some of the toddler foods that were high in calories or fat were not ultra-processed,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n \u201cBut we saw that most of the less-processed foods that exceeded these thresholds contained nuts or meat, which are high in fat and calories but have other valuable nutrients.\u201d<\/p>\n The ultra-processed ones over those limits were different inside. Ultra-processed cheeses and sauces raised the fat and calories without adding nutritional benefit, she said.<\/p>\n Sodium was the most common failure, at 25% of products. Ultra-processed products were no more likely to go over that limit than less-processed ones.<\/p>\n Mac and cheese and turkey sticks exceeded the limits for sodium and fat, cheese puffs for calories, and peanut butter puffs for all three.<\/p>\n Food labels could help parents choose<\/p>\n None of this shows on the front of the box. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA<\/a>) has proposed a panel for the front of most packages, marking saturated fat, sodium and added sugars as low, medium, or high. That rule isn\u2019t final.<\/p>\n \u201cFront-of-package warning labels could really help parents,\u201d Hudson said. Currently, no product in the U.S. has to carry a warning that it is high in sugar, sodium, or calories.<\/p>\n In Chile, she said, a product high in sugar, sodium, fat or calories has to carry a black octagon on the front. For sugar, Chile counts the total rather than the added sugar alone. <\/p>\n Studies have linked those warning labels<\/a> to fewer purchases of labeled products. In addition, the labels are linked to weight loss in children, and to manufacturers changing their recipes.<\/p>\n The audit measured foods, not diets<\/p>\n Hudson\u2019s team counted packages in one metro area, and 21 stores may not represent every store in the country. Nothing here tracks what a child ate.<\/p>\n Hudson presented the work in July in a session on ultra-processed foods at the Gaylord National Resort in National Harbor, Maryland. A committee of experts picked the abstract<\/a> for NUTRITION 2026<\/a>. <\/p>\n The American Society for Nutrition treats results presented there as preliminary until peer review.<\/p>\n Would warning labels change purchases?<\/p>\n No one has measured what a black octagon on a toddler pouch would do to an American shopping cart, because no American package carries one. Chile\u2019s evidence covers a whole food supply rather than one aisle.<\/p>\n Hudson said the manuscript she is preparing also covers the claims printed on these packages and how the aisles differ by neighborhood.<\/p>\n The FDA\u2019s panel is still a proposal. Even if it is finalized, that panel would rate added sugars, and the sugar in a fruit puree doesn\u2019t have to be declared as added sugar.<\/p>\n The full study has not been published in a journal yet. Hudson presented<\/a> the work at NUTRITION 2026.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Parents may assume toddler foods meet special nutrition standards. 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