to think advertising of baby pouches needs to be restricted?

[Pearl87]

Ella's Kitchen outright admit their product should only be used sparingly. A lot of parents use these pouches as the main source of their child's nutrition.

I don't believe for a minute that someone who can't afford electric can afford baby pouches for every meal they cost a fortune!

There’s nothing wrong with these as meals that I can see. I’ve looked at the nutrition values for the chicken curry (which sounds nice) and there’s 7g of protein in it (daily requirement for a 10min to baby is 11g) and 4g of fibre. A ten month old needs about 800 calories, half of it from milk, so 176 calories seems about right too. There’s no added salt or sugar and there’s no nozzle so it’s obviously not meant to be eaten direct from the pouch.

Prepared baby food is hardly new either. Heinz started making it in 1931.

Okay but whats wrong with cooking for your child and not teaching them to rely on slop from a packet?

I'm not sure I’d call brown rice, organic chicken, six different vegetables, mango, coconut and three spices ‘slop’ or a necessarily quick or easy thing to shop for and cook. It’s obviously nutritious and sounds as if it would taste good. What’s the problem?

The meals sound lovely, of course they do, that is all part of the marketing process. It is important for the development of the muscles in the mouth, for young children. These meals, no matter what they claim, will not provide the textures that cooking it, at home will produce. A parent will have control of how fine, or highly textured they make it.

Nope. That “isn’t it.” The pouches have no added sugar or salt.

Fruit contains natural sugars and so pouches which have fruit in have naturally occurring fruit sugars. The same as a freshly picked strawberry or apple has natural fruit sugars.

The meals aren’t purées.

The natural fruit sugars in fruit are accompanied by a lot of fibre. It needs to be chewed and digested which takes time.

Pure sugar in a paste with no fibre in is like drinking a glass of fruit juice. Blood sugar spike, then insulin spike. It's junk. Just like eating an orange is good, but drinking a pint of orange juice is bad. You may as well drink a glass of coke.

These pouches have more than a whole days allowance of sugar for a baby. It doesn't matter where it comes from it's too much!

They’re microwaved pouches. They teach children nothing about food, about cooking and eating and patience.

We didn’t use pouches or jars. We boiled veg, made the ice cubes and then batch cooked as they got bigger etc. However, it was a pain in the neck with us both working full-time.

How can you say all that prep, cooking and freezing is easier than opening up a pouch? Of course it’s better to have home-cooked food. But saying it’s ‘easier’ seems a bit disingenuous really. How is it easier than cooking?

I bought one of those prune puree pouches once when DS2 was constipated. It was insanely sweet. I ended up giving him a couple of spoons of it in some yoghurt, and it did the trick, so goodness knows what would have happened to his bowels if he'd had all of it. Anyway, here's something that's utterly insane: if you look at the Tesco website, they list the nutrition information of their own brand version in terms of its percentage of the reference daily intake for an adult - which you don't find out unless you specifically open up the nutrition tab. So the traffic light thing claims it's 'medium' sugar, which it definitely isn't for a 6-month-old baby.
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/301269089?sc_cmp=ppcGHS+-+Grocery+-+NewMPX_PMAX_All_OT_Home+Entertainment_Online+Budget_1011017**301269089*&gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADiyNasFZQ03GRXmCshX_TDdhb2mj&gclid=Cj0KCQjw8cHABhC-ARIsAJnY12xF2voeJ6sxrFm0ltUa9vJxJut8LBVVtbPIgQQUIusjT_fLyQzm7bYaAu15EALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

‘then their just stupid’ they’re
‘Not decieved’ deceived

Sorry, but I hate people calling others stupid.

The level of smuggery and superciliousness on this thread is off the scale.

Some posters are just so desperate to share how well they cooked for their babies, and they are fighting for those parenting medals. It is possible to dislike these pouches and the marketing behind them, without having to pour contempt on other parents who used them.

I’m pretty sure this makes zero difference to a child’s adult life. Babies aren’t brilliantly patient and that’s normal. I think there’s a but of natural childbirth type Puritanism going on here. It doesn’t matter that if food is healthy, nutritious, varied and appeals to babies, it also has to be hard work. Ideally hard work for a mother.

That really is very deliberately misleading of them.

The same quantity of stewed prunes cooked at home would have exactly the same sugar content, but you wouldn’t know and you wouldn’t worry about it.

@JoyousEagle I think it's probably just a stupid mistake/ unthinking application of the rules about food labelling in general. But it does illustrate the points that it can be hard to find accurate information, and that there needs to be greater oversight of how baby food specifically is/can be labelled.

Of course it does. Every interaction we have with food shapes our relationship with it in the future.

Yes but the idea is that when not using these pouches you will reach for less sugary foods, or they will be eaten whole with the skin and fibre (e.g. in the case of strawberries)

I'm not worried about it, and I don't in general feed my baby prunes. (I tried, actually, because I needed him to do a poo, but he wasn't keen!). But I looked up the pouch I bought that time out of curiosity, and what it shows is that the labelling is misleading, even for someone who was deliberately looking for the information.

Also, I know what prunes taste like and I also tasted that pouch and the concentrated sweetness was much more intense. I could eat a prune, but I wouldn't be able to eat this. So it's probably not great to be getting babies used to that level of sweetness.

Are prunes unhealthy now? Blimey, they are fruit! It’s not a chocolate bar or packet of crisps. I would have been pretty smug at giving my kids puréed stewed prunes back in the (pre-pouch) day. And of course the Ella’s kitchen fruit purées contain the whole fruit and fibre. I used to give my kids puréed, squashed banana. That’s also high in sugar. I thought I was doing pretty well.

Yes but I don’t think the traffic light system is legally required so common sense would probably decide that for food that is obviously children’s food, it’s not only not appropriate or relevant, it’s actively misleading. Probably doesn’t really matter for something that is 9% of adult intake. But for something sweeter that was say, 50%, that’s presumably well over any recommendations for babies.

Are you just deliberately ignoring the posts where the mum is saying she ate a prune, and the Ellas Kitchen prune puree pouch and the pouch was unbearably sweet and didn't actually taste like prunes?

Is there a parent out there who saw the documentary and thought “wow this is brand new information?”

Packaged food is never going to be nutritionally best. No company is going to market the food as “it’s a bit shit but it will do if you are in a hurry”

We don’t have the same sort of exposé on other types of food, but for some reason they think mothers are stupid and have no idea what they are doing.

We used the jars mainly, rather than the pouches when we were out and about as they were convenient. We kept the empty jars and filled them with our own purées because we knew the shop bought stuff wasn’t great for every day feeding.

Use of healthy sounding marketing words is across every type of food. There are already restrictions around it.

We really need to get over this attitude that calling something out as bad for children is mum shaming.

Obviously real food for children that is not processed and packaged as a convenience food is better for children for a whole host of reasons, not just to make mums life difficult.

To raise children well is hard work. It's not mum bashing to acknowledge this.