Welcome to PedsDocTalk TV. I'm
Dr. Mona Amin, a Board Certified Pediatrician, and mom. And we're
going to be talking all about sugar and spice and everything
nice in your infant and toddler's diet. This is going to
go over salt, seasonings, and sugar. Can they have it? When
can they have it and how much is too much. Before we continue,
make sure you hit that subscribe button below this video, because
that's how you stay up to date on all of my content.
And make
sure to follow me at PedsDocTalk on Instagram. And here we go. I wanted to make
this video because I feel like when you're starting to
introduce solids or even when you have a toddler, it can be
very confusing. The recommendations on what you can
give your child if you go online, they'll say you know,
feed your baby what you eat. But watch the salt, watch the sugar,
watch seasonings, it can be too much for their gut.
I'm going to
really break it down for you all in this video in an
easy-to-understand way. And just explain to you how I kind of
approach salt, seasonings, and sugar for your child. So we're
going to talk about salt first. So why is there a concern about
salt, namely in your infant's diet? So the three things you
probably heard about salt in your infant or toddler diet is
number one, too much salt can harm their kidneys. Number two, too much salt can
predispose them to having high blood pressure later in life.
And number three, eating a salty diet can make them only want
salty foods and nothing else. I'm going to explain all three
of these things and why they may or may not be true. So the first
thing is that salt can harm an infant's kidneys. There are no
peer-reviewed studies showing that. Now that being said, when
you start to introduce food for your infant, maybe around six
months, their kidneys are formed.
So they can handle the
amount of salt that we're giving them in the home-cooked meals
that we give. We don't have any data that says every baby will
be able to handle X amount of sodium. So when you see people say,
well, you have to have this amount or this amount, that's
actually not data proven. This is just a theoretical thing that
we want to basically have parents watch out for the sodium
content.
I don't need you to sit there and calculate okay, well,
my child had this for lunch, this for breakfast, okay, can't
do that. You're looking at it in the food choices that you make
and how you purchase items. So if you're home cooking a meal
and you add salt to that, I'm okay with that. If you're adding
tons of salt to every single meal, maybe you want to hold
back and diversify the content, not just for the salt, but
because maybe you want to diversify the different types of
foods your child's getting.
In terms of the foods that you're
purchasing, I will be very, very wary of buying, packaged and
processed foods, especially for your infant or toddler, because
these can have high volumes of sodium and also sugar, which
I'll get into. But if you look at the packaging, and it says
sodium, and that number's pretty high, I want you to watch out
for those things. Things like canned soups, any packaged
foods, these are the things that can carry a lot of salt. Certain
cheeses can also carry a lot of salt, right, these are packaged
in a way. So you want to try to do certain cheeses that are low
in sodium content. So these cheeses could include
ricotta, swiss, fresh mozzarella, or cottage cheese.
So if you're looking to give your child cheeses, you can go
with those low sodium options.
Now just say you accidentally or
you did give your child cheddar cheese which does have high
sodium content, you want to see well am I giving my child
cheddar cheese every single meal. Now, this was one time, I
don't want to want you to panic if you did give your child a
sodium-rich cheese, but you want to balance it out. The goal here
is not to overwhelm their body with the same type of food,
salty, salty foods, but you want to diversify it. And the other goal here is to
try and home cook your meals because when you're home cooking
your meals, you know exactly how much seasoning you're putting in
and how much salt you're putting in it too.
The next point is
that salt can predispose someone to high blood pressure. Now I do
not want to dismiss that an adult diet that is high in
sodium can cause high blood pressure. But this is all about
balance. As I said, I don't want you to guilt yourself if you
give your child sodium-rich food, but is that what you're
giving your child for every meal? I'm going to use canned
soup as an example, canned soup is high in sodium. So if you're
giving your child this for lunch, and dinner, lunch and
dinner, that's going to add up, right? That's going to allow
them to have a high sodium diet for pretty much most of their
meals. But if it's soup for dinner one day, and then a
couple of days later, you do it for lunch. Maybe you do it for
dinner another day.
That's okay. But it's up to realizing the
balance that you're going to provide, everything in feeding
our child comes to balance. We don't want anything in too much
quantity. That includes things that are healthy too. We don't want them to eat
broccoli every day. We don't want them to eat spinach every
day. We want to diversify their tastes, textures, and the
variety of different things that you're offering them. The last
thing is that salt intake in infancy can predispose them to
only salty foods later in life. I mean think about this from a
common-sense perspective. This is why as a pediatrician and
mom, I really want to diversify that palette for that child from
a young age. This means not always over-seasoning or
over-salting foods, right, you want to do diversify, you want
to offer different types of foods to your child.
So they can
experience different flavors and different textures. When you're
doing this, you're not going to allow them to only have salty
foods, right? When you're exposing them and exposing them,
you're exposing them to so many different things that you're not
creating a preference for one thing. So if you're at home,
cooking your meal, and your child is eating that meal, too.
So just so you're doing baby-led weaning, and you're preparing
that food down, it's okay that there's salt on
it.
Now, if you are prone to eating a high salt diet every
meal, then maybe you want to reconsider that for your infant
or your toddler just from a balanced perspective. But it's
okay to give your child what you're eating, you don't have to
create separate meals, as long as you're balancing the
seasonings and salt too. And just from a common-sense
perspective, think about you eating food, you're not going to
want to eat something without any flavor, it's not the most
appetizing. Same thing for our infants and our toddlers. It's
okay to add salt to that. And as I get into seasonings, it's also
okay to add seasonings, because even I would not want to eat
that. But it's important to incorporate variety, right, you
don't want to overseason every meal, because when they eat
something a little more bland, they may be more averse to it.
You want to vary the amount of seasonings that you're putting
in, a little salt, little pepper, whatever you're doing,
but don't worry so much if you're giving your child what
you're eating, because that's what you're eating too.
So as a
summary for infants under one year old, so just so you start
solids around six months, I would try to home cook all of
your meals. If you are buying packaged foods or processed
foods, please be mindful of the sodium levels, because that can
be a lot of sodium for any child, including an infant. Now for all those packaged and
processed foods, I want you to balance it out in their meal
plan. If you gave that for dinner one day, I don't want you
to give that for every meal. This is how we're going to avoid
all those three things that you've heard, you're not going
to overwhelm their kidneys by balancing, you're not going to
lead to high blood pressure by a balanced diet. And you're not
going to allow them to only want salty foods when you're allowing
them to explore various things. Over one, it's okay to let that
go a little bit in terms of the processed foods, but still, be
mindful.
I really think it's important if we can, and time
permitting, to balance the foods we give our toddler. So over one year of age, with
home-cooked meals and foods that we buy or that are ready-made.
So the next thing we're going to talk about is very similar to
salt, but it has to do with spices. And so some
pediatricians say you should wait till your child is eight
months. There is no data or literature to support this. I'm
Indian American, we eat a lot of spices in our food. And we
introduce spices from a young age. I'm going to explain what
the concerns may be and why your pediatrician may say to wait and
have you decide what's best for your child.
So the worry about
spices would be more so that their guts may not be able to
handle that excitement if you will. So what I usually
recommend in this situation is when you start solid, there's no
reason that you have to load that with spices or salt, start
slow right, maybe a little bit of pepper, a little bit of salt,
a little bit of cumin, paprika, whatever spice that you want to
use. Start slow, start with just a few things at a time. See how their stomach is able to
handle it. Some signs of GI upset may be a little bit of
diarrhea, but honestly, when you're introducing any food, it
can cause some changes in the gut.
I feel like if you are
going to start solid at six months, it is okay to start
seasoning. This is a cultural thing too. A lot of cultures
introduce spices from a young age, you should not give your
child a five-alarm chili, they do not need this. But my
recommendation is that when you start solid and especially after
that six-month mark, you can start giving them the foods you
are eating as well. And if that includes salt, that includes
paprika, cumin, turmeric, that is okay. There is no data to
support that a baby cannot handle these spices, you can
start slow just to ease them into it.
But once you've noticed
that you're doing well with it, you can start to advance and
explore with different seasonings that you eat in your
family's diet. So in regards to spicy food, I mentioned you
don't want to give them a five-alarm chili. Really, really
spicy food is not going to be fun for the infant, right, they
are not used to that level of spice. There's no rush to give
them something extremely spicy. So I'd be very wary of things
like that. One last thing about seasoning and salt. You don't
want to overdo everything when I said incorporate salt,
incorporate seasoning, it doesn't mean that you should do
it for every meal all the time because like I said, you want
your child to experience the different flavors and different
textures that exist in food. So if you start to overseason
everything right, if you're so used to cooking like an Indian
meal with turmeric, cumin, garam masala, all of these things, and
then you give something to them that may be a little bit more
bland. They're going to be confused, right? So you really
want to incorporate a variety of different foods, a variety of
different textures as well.
So after six months of age, I am
okay with infants and toddlers eating salt and seasonings,
because if you're eating that food, I want them to experience
it as well. This is not only important for picky eating
right, because we want our children from a young age to
experience the different types of foods out there. It's also
just really good from an anti-inflammatory perspective,
the food that we eat and the seasonings that we use, so
everything that I mentioned, but salt, pepper, garlic, cumin,
turmeric, all of these spices are really good for our immune
system. They are nature's anti-inflammatory. And when we
start to use them in our cooking, they have a good health
benefit, too. So we talked about salt, we
talked about seasoning, I love talking about all that because I
love that in our foods. But now we need to talk about sugar, and
I'm talking about added sugars.
If you go to the grocery store,
and you see a nutrition label like this, if you notice, it
says added sugars, right? Added sugar means sugars that had to
be added in the manufacturing process to make it sweet. Those
are artificial sugars. Those are the sugars that I'm more
concerned about than the sugars that are naturally occurring. So
if you look at milk, for example, milk has lactose and
lactose is a type of sugar. This is a naturally occurring sugar.
I'm not as concerned about this. So when we're talking about
sugar in this episode, I'm talking about the added sugars
that you're putting into your children's meals. So why is it
important that we talk about added sugars? Well, the reality
is too much-added sugar in our diets is not beneficial to our
health not only for our kids but also for ourselves.
It can put
us at risk for obesity, high blood pressure, tooth decay,
heart disease, high cholesterol, type two diabetes, and fatty
liver, which is why we ask families to monitor the added
sugars that we're putting into our diets and our children's
diets. So why are fruits okay? So things like fruits,
vegetables, and dairy products, like milk, for example, have
naturally occurring sugars in them, the sugars are okay, when
we're talking about fruit, fruit also has fiber in it.
And fiber
can help slow down that process of sugar metabolism that causes
those spikes in sugar. If we were to eat more added sugars,
that's the concern. So we still don't want to overdo fruit, we
still don't want to overdo milk, we still don't want to overdo
anything. But that's what I said at the beginning of this
episode. This whole thing is about moderation for everything.
So how much is too much? Well, unfortunately, there's no
standard, well, this person or this person needs X amount of
sugar because that's as much as their body can handle.
That's as
much as their body can metabolize. If we do any more
than they're going to have sugar spikes, that's going to lead to
obesity… So but we have to create some standards so that
families can monitor the intake that they're doing for sugar. So the American Academy of
Pediatrics, their recommendation is that under two years of age,
we want to avoid added sugars. And remember added sugars are
anything where you look at the packaging, and it says added
sugars on it. So fruits, milk, those are not added sugars,
these are naturally occurring sugars in those items. Now what
if you have a one-year-old who has a birthday cake that
obviously has added sugar in it, I don't want you to feel
guilted, I don't want you to feel like you did something bad.
I don't want you to shame someone on the internet that you
see do that. This is more on a regular basis, right? I don't
want you to have a regular basis that you're giving your child
under two added sugars. But here and there you are in charge.
This is the same role I have with my screentime video, which
I'm actually linking above because it's very similar.
When
we create rules for our children, you are in charge of
those rules. If that means that on special occasions, you are
giving your one-year-old a cookie, that's fine. But you
want that to be the exception and not the rule. That is how I
feel about most things in parenting, right? It's the
exception that hey, I'm okay giving my child this sweet item.
I'm okay with giving my child
this cookie because we're creating boundaries here. But
what I don't want is that that becomes a regular thing. Right?
Okay, well, we gave them a cookie, now let's just give them
this juice and this item and this item You want to really
monitor that sugar intake. When I talk about sugar intake, it's
that added sugars under two, but it's okay to have fun.
It's okay
to give ice cream, you can do all those things. But you in
your mind have to set some boundaries and make sure that
that's not becoming the rule of the household for your
two-year-old. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends
that for over two, you want to aim for less than 25 grams, or
six teaspoons of added sugar a day for your child. But
remember, this is a goal and this is just for you to monitor. As parents, we are so busy. I
don't need you to sit there and calculate and create all these
Excel sheets and grids. Okay, what am I giving in terms of
salt, sugar? This is just about being mindful about the foods
you buy and about what you're eating as a family in general.
And if you're doing that, you're not going to go wrong.
You don't
need to sit there and calculate. But when I go shopping, Ryan is
15 months, I do look at the nutrition labels for added
sugars for the foods that I'm giving him. Some of them do have
added sugar. And the AAP says that under two you should not
give your child anything with added sugar. some snacks I do
allow him to have with added sugar, but it's a snack that I'm
not giving him every day and a snack that's in his meal plan
maybe a few times a week. It's okay to do that. But you have to be very balanced
and understand that it's not always all or none.
But you
don't want to go to the side where you're becoming more
lenient and allowing more of that sugar to come in because we
don't want them to have a predilection to sugar, and we
want to allow them to explore different flavors and tastes
similar to salt and seasonings over two, also prioritizing
water and milk. So water with meals is ideal.
Milk is also an
option too, that you can do throughout the day, minimizing
or avoiding soft drinks, sports drinks, sweetened teas, these
are all things that have added sugars in them and they are very
delicious. So I say to my office all the times these kids love
these drinks. Of course they do, it tastes delicious. I do too.
Is it bad to give your child these drinks here and there? No, but you want to make sure
that they're not taking so much of that in terms of fruit juice,
the AAP does recommend that between the ages of one and
three, a 100% fruit juice is okay, as long as you're not
doing more than four ounces per child between four to six. So
you can do four to six ounces of 100% fruit juice a day. And if
your child is older than that, you can do eight ounces of 100%
fruit juice.
I personally don't feel like fruit juice is needed.
Even though it's 100%. You can give them naturally occurring
fruits, you can give them that. If you want to squeeze down an
orange and give them orange juice, and you made that at
home, that's awesome. Or make like a fresh smoothie out of
fresh fruit. That's great. We don't need to buy these fruit
juices even if they're marketed as 100% fruit juice because you
can just give them naturally occurring fruits and make that
at home.
Also remember that sometimes for
fruit juices, your doctor may recommend that as a medicine or
treatment. For example, prune juice, prune juice has a high
amount of sugar, it is naturally occurring sugar, I believe has
about 22 grams of sugar per serving. Your doctor may
recommend that because it can be something very helpful for
constipation. So of course, we're okay when used here and
there for a therapeutic purpose. But you really want to be
mindful of what you're purchasing on a regular basis
for everyday consumption. My three take-homes. Number one,
moderation is key, you're going to hear me talk about that all
the time as a pediatrician and as a fellow mom as well. It's
important to remember that it's not all or none.
I give my son a
little bit of sugar here and there as a treat because we are
able to create that boundary, we know that this is all we're
allowing, right? Moderation is so important. With salt, with
seasoning, with sugar, I don't want it to be too much of a good
thing. This is so important. I also talked about it in my
episode that I did about heavy metals and baby food. We want to give them a variety
of different foods because it's important that we are not giving
them all salt, all sugar, all of one thing because that's not
good for them. And we want them to explore different things.
Number two, a child's food preference is built in those
first two years of life.
This is why I am very passionate about
food introduction at six months of age, why I'm so big on
introducing variety to kids because their palate is
developing in those first two years. You really want to expose
them to a variety of different seasoning salt, sugar, whatever
it is, but I want you to incorporate a variety of
cultural foods too. If you yourself are not into those
cultural foods, that's fine, but try to expand their palate in
different seasonings that you may not normally eat for your
family.
And you'll be surprised you may like it too. You do not need to do spicy food
because obviously, not everyone can tolerate that. But you
really want them to start experiencing the different
flavors that different cuisines have to offer. The last thing is don't beat
yourself up too much. There are so many rules. I know the AAP
has these rules. Other people, other friends may have rules
that are different than yours. I want you to come up with a rule
that works for your family understanding that we want to
balance and reduce salt intake, reduce sugar intake and
diversify, I don't need you to sit there with a calculator.
I
just want you to make a rule that works for your family
similar to the screentime episode that I talked about.
Make sure you understand the impacts that a high sugar diet
can have. Make sure you understand the impact that only
getting salty foods can have, but when you're diversifying
their foods, you're not going to be doing too much of one thing. Make sure to comment below on
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Talk to you next week..
