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.

There’s pretty much exactly the same amount of sugar in 70g of banana as there is in this 70g pouch. Are we going to stop giving babies/toddlers bananas now?

Except we’ve gone from ‘omg this food is so unhealthy!’ to ‘OK it’s not unhealthy but it doesn’t teach babies how to cook!’

No one who thinks this stuff is unhealthy has ceded that actually it is healthy on this thread.

Our local foodbank gives out baby food pouches

For the millionth time. An actual banana is full of fibre, needs chewing, and is digested more slowly. Also my baby certainly can't eat a whole banana, she eats a quarter and she's full.

Pureed banana, is like drinking drinking a glass of coke. Blood sugar spike, insulin spike. And is a boatload more sugar because when you liquify something it's shrinks a lot so you can consume a lot more of it before being full.

Like eating an orange is good. Drinking a pint of orange juice is bad.

I puréed (squashed) banana before giving it to my 16-20 week old back in the day and fed it to him on a spoon. I also made apple purées, so shoot me. Puréed fruit has fibre. It doesn’t dematerialise the minute it sees a stick blender. 70g isn’t a whole banana - I chose that weight as that’s the amount of prune purée in the Tesco pouch. I’m just saying it has exactly the same amount of sugar.

Then they are wrong. A meal with 11 plant based ingredients, fibre, sufficient protein from organic chicken plus spices, no salt, sugar or artificial additives is obviously healthy.

Edited to include quoted post

Then you should probably get your baby looked at by a doctor, as if she can only eat such tiny amounts of food then she's probably getting even less nutrients than the pouch babies do. Standard breakfast for my babies has been a bowl of porridge and a full banana (and the current baby usually wants more after that).

Lol. The whole thread and panorama exposé is about the fact these pouches aren't healthy.

Considering she's only 10 months old, eats three meals and a snack a day and is still breastfeeding and gaining weight and growing I'm sure she's fine.

Babies don't need a lot of food.

Given ‘with a spoon’, but here is a photo of the founder.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30411724

Kids and parents don’t stand a chance against massive marketing campaigns.

So I'm a victim of auto correct but you don't posses reading comprehension.

They are stupid. And they're usually dangerous in other aspects as well.

And I am better than them.

Because I said I have no issue with people who say they use them and are aware of the reality.

The stupid people are the ones that will stand by, against all evidence, that they are junk food. They are ones who will blindly believe they are healthy and are the best option.

I don't need to fight for a medal.
As babies my children ate healthy. That's not something to be proud of....it's the basics.

Blended fruit actually causes LESS of a spike in blood sugar than whole fruit. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9657402/

No. It's about how baby food companies mislead parents by obscuring nutritional data with jargon about "organic" and "balanced", and exploiting the average person's understanding of nutritional requirements to the detriment of babies.

Do you really think the average person on the street understands the interplay between fibre content and blood sugar levels? Or the difference between fruit sugar that is still contained in fruit cell walls and that which has been mechanically released? Or how to reliably preserve vitamin C when preparing food? Some of the most contemptuous posters on this thread are talking about just boiling up a carrot, which isn't going to result in much more vitamin C than a pouch, so they appear to know a bit less then they think.

Then it’s wrong. The claim was there was a lack of protein. The Ella’s meals have healthy amounts of protein and fibre etc and no additives. Even Panorama had to admit that the company’s fruit pouches were high in vitamin C. I never gave any of my kids pouches - they didn’t exist - but I had piling on mum guilt pointlessly

I can see that lots of people on this thread repeating nonsense such as ‘puréed food has no fibre’ and ‘blended fruit spikes blood sugar’

I had a sodding Annabel Karmel wall chart in my kitchen for my kids. But they also had HIPP jars. I never cooked a baby a meal with 11 different plants in it though.

I used quite a lot of Hipp jars nearly 20 years ago weaning DD1, probably fewer with DD2 as I was a more confident cook and mother - the first time I used a blender with DD1's food I couldn't work out why it was full of plastic bits - turned out there was a plastic cover on the blade 🙈.

Pouches and the like are only going to be used for a short period of their lives, when babies are also having tons of milk for nutrition. Seems a lot of hoo haa about nothing.

Yes, this fits with my experience.
Ella's Kitchen pouches came out when my youngest was a baby and there was a definite swing away from other types of commercially prepared baby food amongst the better off Mums that I knew. Prior to that the options were powder that you mixed with milk, jars, or tiny little cans. I don't know that any of them were really any better or worse in nutritional terms but lots of Mums definitely believed that the pouches were better, fresher, more modern and more natural than the alternatives. Mums I knew that wouldn't have been seen dead feeding their baby from a Cow and Gate jar or Heinz tin were suddenly happily whipping out Ella's Kitchen pouches at our local Mother & Baby group. Even the name will have been chosen to that end. Ella's Kitchen creates a very different picture in your mind to Heinz Cannery doesn't it? What parent wouldn't choose a recipe lovingly developed by another parent for their own child over something mass produced by a huge manufacturer? There was an illusion of bespoke artisan baby food for the discerning parent. A triumph of style over substance. But that is after all what successful marketing is all about.

There was an illusion of bespoke artisan baby food for the discerning parent. A triumph of style over substance. But that is after all what successful marketing is all about.

Ah yes, appealing to those with more money, no doubt.

Laboratory testing of 18 pouches made by Ella's Kitchen, Heinz, Piccolo, Little Freddie, Aldi and Lidl found many to be low in vitamin C and iron, while some contained more sugar in a single pouch than a one-year-old should have in a day.

Experts have told the BBC the products should only be used sparingly, are not replacements for homemade meals, and can cause children health problems if used as their main source of nutrition.

If you think this means they are healthy you are deluded.

Do you really think the average person on the street understands the interplay between fibre content and blood sugar levels? Or the difference between fruit sugar that is still contained in fruit cell walls and that which has been mechanically released?

Yes. I remember it being explained on cereal adverts when I was a teenager as to why wholegrain cereals were better than things like Coco pops. Anyone who has ever gone to weight watchers or slimming world (which I would wager is most women) will know that you can eat as much whole fruit as you want but once you blend it and start drinking fruit juice or smoothies it counts as sins or whatever because it's not food anymore it's just liquid sugar. This is basic public knowledge. Fuck me it's all Gillian McKeith and Dr Christian and all the other TV health gurus banged on about for 10 years!

Autocorrect. Sure.

‘Ate healthy’ healthily

So that's all you had?
😅

Yep! I hate people calling other parents stupid like this.