Toddler foods lack nutrition standards
The United States sets no nutrient standards for toddler food, so researchers grade the aisle against a European model. The World Health Organization (WHO) office for Europe published one in 2022.
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 fell short of the same model.
Most toddler foods were ultra-processed
Their team photographed the baby and toddler aisles of 21 grocery stores around Austin, Texas, including national chains and regional ones.
They pulled each product’s nutrition facts and ingredients off the stores’ websites. That came to 2,783 products in 11 categories. The researchers excluded infant formula, drinks, and babies’ first purees.
Ultra-processed foods are industrial mixtures of refined starches, oils, isolated proteins, and additives, not food you’d 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. Across all the products, 49% of them went over at least one WHO limit.
h/t pool