Contents:
- Medical Video: How to Create a Healthy Plate
- Recommendation for normal sugar levels for children in a day
- Tips to limit children's daily sugar consumption
Medical Video: How to Create a Healthy Plate
Sweet foods are closely related to children's snacks. Indeed, sugar is needed by the body to be used as energy. But everything that is excessive is certainly not good. Besides damaging teeth, eating lots of sugar can increase the risk of children getting type 2 diabetes and obesity. Too much sweet foods can also harm the heart. For this reason, you as a wise parent must know the normal sugar levels for children in a day so as not to harm his health.
Recommendation for normal sugar levels for children in a day
Children's bodies are designed to more easily burn calories than adults, but their bodies are very vulnerable to the negative effects of consuming too much sugar. Therefore, do not match the daily sugar requirements of your little ones with their siblings, or even with yourself.
According to WHO, your body only needs less than 10% sugar from total energy intake, equivalent to 50 grams of sugar per day (if your daily energy needs are 2000 calories / day). Based on the Indonesian Ministry of Health, the recommendations for daily sugar consumption by age group are:
- 3 years old: 2-5 teaspoons
- Age 4-6 years: 2.5-6 teaspoons
- Age 7-12 years: 4-8 teaspoons
- More than 13 years, and includes adults: 5-9 teaspoons (40 grams)
The American Heart Association recommends that children aged 2-18 should only consume six teaspoons per day to maintain heart health.
As for children under 2 years, you should not consume any extra sugar at all. This is due to their lower calorie needs. In addition, this age range is an important time to develop appetite. By limiting normal sugar levels, it is expected that children do not pick food so they like a variety of foods that are important for achieving balanced nutrition.
Tips to limit children's daily sugar consumption
The FDA said that information about additional sugars on food labels could help increase consumer awareness about the amount of added sugar contained in certain food products. It's best if you already know the limit of sugar intake per day, you need to pay attention to the sugar content of the food products you buy, especially the added sugar content.
When you add sugar in every food you serve, then you can estimate how much the rest of your child's daily sugar consumption needs when you give your baby a drink. This is the reason why you should look at labels on food or drinks.
When you read the label of the food product, you must be more observant because often the word sugar is written in other terms, such as sugar cane, sugar syrup, sugar, dextrose, fructose, honey, sucrose, or any word ending in "-osa" .
In addition, the thing that makes it difficult for children to avoid sugar is the sweetness it produces; so one way to reduce sugar is to add more flavor to the food or drink he consumes. You can use cocoa or vanilla powder, spices such as nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, and others. Adding spices as a spice in cooking can also be a great way to sharpen the senses of taste and broaden their knowledge of various tastes.
Don't forget to balance children's sugar intake with protein, healthy fats and fiber in their food. This combination can slow the release of blood sugar into the body and make it full longer.
