To be shocked by this government dietary advice for babies and children?

[fourfoxsakes]

from the government in Northern Ireland that is published online? Surely we don’t do these things any more such as mixing baby rice with milk and advising people to feed their very young children rice crispies and cornflakes for breakfast and advising people to give juice with meals! Surely this is bad advice, I am honestly surprised that the government have been allowed to publish this crap. I have no doubt people still do these things which is an individual parenting choice but surely the government shouldn’t be advocating for this?

I was also thinking this about including cereal because they are fortified with iron.

I think it is also the carbs and the fortified vitamins from the cereal itself - which isn't unique to rice crispies, but isn't in all cereals, including some of the ones being suggested as healthier alternatives on this thread - both of which are also important for babies and toddlers.

My local supermarket is 3 miles away, which is fine for me to walk to, when I had two small children to wrangle, it was not at all fine especially if I’m coming back with a weeks food shop. And walking a 6 mile round trip with kids takes time in the day you simply don’t have especially if you’re juggling nursery, school and work.

If you have £30 for your weeks food budget you need things that’s kids will reliably eat because you don’t have money to replace uneaten meals. Parents will chose things that are shelf stable, and that they know their kids will eat, so fruit juice, canned and frozen fruit and vegetables. They may also not have money for cooking fuel so need things that’s can be cooked using minimum gas and electricity which excludes cheaper cuts of meat, mumsnet pulses etc.

If that has not been part of your experience you are privileged indeed.

Maybe that's the advice they should be giving because no matter how I try to store fruit it goes off quickly. Not that I'm buying green bananas as I need to buy ones that are edible at the time.

It makes me laugh when people say nutritious food isn't expensive. It is when compared to the cheaper, convenient alternatives. And that's the only relevant comparison.

Yep. MN claims to be educated, aware and intelligent but many posters are just totally oblivious to the realities of life for many people.

Not to mention if your kids don't eat it, it goes to waste and money is wasted from your limited food budget when you know that they will eat rice krispies.

But you have to be able to make porridge, which takes time that people may not have, and it requires a lot of milk or it's unpalatable. Also something to sweeten it e.g. fruit, honey (both expensive).
A bag of satsumas is no better than a box of juice - the sugar in the satsumas does the same damage as that in the juice.
MN is full of people who tell the benighted that they could live better if they cooked from scratch every day, bought wholefood ingredients and organic produce. But us benighted folks don't necessarily have time for all the cooking involved, don't have a big freezer we can batch cook into and can't afford all these ingredients on a regular basis, because we are on the minimum wage, work shifts, and didn't learn how to cook at school or at home (because same reasons!). If you do not understand what a recipe book is saying you cannot cook the meal, even if you have time (you often don't).
The obesity crisis was fueled by a desire in the 80s to promote the food industry so that women could participate in the work force (ulterior aims were lowering wages by increasing the workforce, and profit from selling ready prepared food - ends helped by removing Domestic Science from schools and replacing it with Food Technology). Reverse the policy by not promoting ready prepared food and you have a chance of halting obesity. People have to learn to cook, how to follow a recipe, how to set out a nutritional menu, how to fit this in with a full-time job...it has to be taught (as we used to do).

I hear this a lot and I find it so confusing.

Would you mind just explaining a little bit what you mean by cheaper, convenient alternatives?

And also who the people are that need them?

I feel like I sometimes underestimate the depth of poverty in this country (as you can see, I'm just an exasperated lay person...), but is it really possible that people can't afford to buy (and cook!) oats, onions, carrots, potatoes, lentils, cheap cuts of pork/beef?

And should this subset of the population not have their own tailored dietary advice from the NHS? Rather than the NHS giving the impression to the general population who really should be able to afford and do better that it is actually recommending rice crispies and diluting juice.

There's nothing wrong with it. My DC wouldn't drink any water, juice was recommended by the HV because he was experiencing constipation due to only drinking milk. Some children will struggle with flavours when weaning and rice with milk can help with a gentle transition. Some parents will want a quick cheap breakfast, some children will want something bland, better that they are being given the suggestions of corn flakes and rice crispies rather than them thinking the list is unachievable so reaching for chocolate cereal.
It's an inclusive and achievable list that will do no harm to the children.

Exactly. The village I’m in at the moment only has one shop - a Londis which is much pricier than a regular supermarket (the closest of which is a 5 mile round trip, or £10 in a taxi there and back, and even then it’s just a standard Tesco. The nearest Aldi is a 30 minute drive or 90 minutes by train as there’s no direct route. The nearest Lidl is about a 75 minute drive.

Some posters on here are just oblivious to what life is like for many people. It’s not as easy as popping to the shop.

Is your actual question 'are there really people in existence who don't have either the knowledge, time, equipment or resources to cook meals from scratch, to store the ingredients in between and to be able to buy ingredients in bulk so that they have a lower cost overall, but a bigger upfront cost?'. You don't already know the answer to that? If you really don't then: no, not everyone has those things. But I would really recommend that you read the news sometimes - you are clear you have resources, so I don't know why you're so ignorant.

You obviously live in a comfortable bubble. Its not just the ingredient costs. Its the fuel costs, kitchen equipment costs, time costs and not having the skills to cook these things well. Its the risk that the children won't eat the food but your shopping budget has gone.

But the "reality" seems to be that this country is full of barely literate, utterly uneducated people living passive, sedentery, unhealthy lives, who cannot be expected to walk beyond the corner shop or think beyond instant gratification when it comes to eating, or even to think or exert themselves in any way.

And if that is not the reality then what is?

I could afford lentils but I can't afford food waste and I wouldn't know where to start with cooking them or even if I would like them because I've never had them before.

Sometimes it isn't necessarily the lentils or whatever that's the issue, it's the fact that trying new things, experimental cooking with more risk of food wastage etc is something I simply can't afford.

So I stick to what I know and what my child will eat.

It is true - you might chose not to believe it and that's your choice, but it's scientifically accurate.

To cook all those things you need time, knowledge and money, which is something millions of families simply don’t have. There are families in this country who don’t have ovens - their only means of cooking are boiled water in a kettle and a microwave, or maybe an air fryer.

There are parents who struggle to read, whose only internet access is via the mobile data on their phones and who don’t have access to basics like spices, herbs and oils.

A box of (supermarket brand) rice crispies can be stored in a cupboard. It won’t go off. It won’t go mouldy. You can’t make it wrong so you don’t need to worry about your kids not liking it (or refusing to eat it because it tastes funny).

Could you just cite your source for 'High sugar, fast absorption spiking blood sugar, zero nutrition and zero fibre'? It's just that it's weird that, if it's scientifically proven fact, three out of the four claims you make are contradicted by the nutrition information that comes with the food itself. They aren't high sugar, don't have zero nutrition and don't have zero fibre.

I was given loads of this welfare orange juice. I’m now 72 and still have 30 teeth - it didn’t appear to have done me any harm.

I was a child in the 1960's (born 1957). We always had breakfast, which was either porridge or a boiled egg with toast. Sometimes bacon and eggs or kippers on a weekend. Lunch was either school dinners or packed lunch. School dinners would be meat and 2 veg and a packed lunch would be ham, cheese, meat paste or egg sandwiches with a piece of fruit. Mid morning we had a tuck shop at school where we could buy crisps or a biscuit if you wanted to and were we given a half pint bottle of milk. Evening meals were always eaten by the whole family together around the kitchen table and were homemade, such as stew, cottage pie or belly of pork (we were poor so mum made the most of cheaper cuts). Other than the aforementioned tuck shop, there was absolutely no snacking between meals. The concept didn't exist and children didn't want or expect it. It seems that children live on chicken nuggets these days and can't wait for their evening meal without being fed snacks, even in the car on the way home from school. However, I don't see the problem with children having breakfast cereal occasionally or a glass of orange juice or baby rice. Children need to explore different flavours from an early age and the human body is incredibly resilient.

Yep, that is the reality for many people. If you don’t understand that (and that those people are who this advice is aimed at) then yes, you’re very, very privileged.

To those who say that some posters are in a bubble - they may be with regards affluence and education. I agree I'm extremely fortunate and privileged to be able to prepare nutritious food and have an educational basis to make healthy choices. That doesn't mean the NHS should promote unhealthy dietary advice for babies and children though. And yes baby rice, rice crispies etc. are unhealthy food choices - that's not to say people don't eat them, can't chose to eat them, don't have the monetary means not to. The NHS shouldn't however promote them if the aim is to support people in making the best dietary choices they can for their babies.

Yes it is possible not to be able to cook lentils. That requires soaking beforehand and long cooking unless you have a pressure cooker (remember those?). Tinned equivalents are as nutritional but you need to know what to do with them! That means you have to be able to negotiate a cookery book.
Carrots and other vegetables will rot if not used quickly and lose their nutritional value after a few days. The tinned or frozen equivalents are as good.
You need skill and time to cook cheap cuts of meat since they require slow cooking.
Everything you have written suggests you have no idea of the lack of culinary skill among the general population and that lack is intentional from the 80s to boost the fast and pre-prepared food industries, both for profit and to widen the number of employed people (thus lowering wages).
Dietary advice for DC has to match what the parents know and understand. It's pointless to tell a young mother who left school with some GCSEs and has a full-time job as a check-out assistant to feed her children home-made porridge in the morning (no time!), to cook from scratch every night using fresh ingredients. But she can feed her DC a cereal like rice crispies with milk (cereal is fortified with vitamins etc and the milk contains calcium and Vit D - as long as not skimmed), to give them diluted fruit juice, and fruit (read the whole menu) and cook simple evening meals which require little cooking expertise and which she already knows about e.g. cottage pie, lasagne etc and knows how to do and what to buy.
The suggestion that 'special' advice be given to the working poor is classist, btw.

I do live in a comfortable bubble!

And I also do get the point about indirect costs associated with food.

But I still don't get what the "cheaper and more convenient" alternatives are to the kind of things I listed, and would be very keen to understand what actual items people feed themselves with instead?

And if volume is the issue driving obesity etc. (as per a pp) then surely the cheaper items will become more expensive over time as you need to buy more just to fill your belly after an hour of eating total crap?

And of course kids won't eat a carrot if they know that a tantrum will hand them a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar! But are we meant to pander to this and spend billions on obesity-driven medicine and dental care because no one can be expected to actually parent because they're so poor and put upon that they need to be absolved of all responsibility?

This kind of utter crisis/societal breakdown is very expensive, and I just don't think being endlessly accepting of low standards in terms of diets and lifestyles is doing anyone any favours.

Often I think they're comparing convenience foods with the latest expensive middle-class "health food", rather than with things like ordinary fresh vegetables, which far from being expensive, are usually the cheapest food in the shop when measured by nutritional value for money.

I sometimes work out what I'd be spending on food if I stuck to a simple and entirely healthy diet, and it would be a tiny amount compared with my more indulgent normal spend.