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COPYRIGHT 2004 Australian Consumers' Association
IN A NUTSHELL
* Not all baby foods are created equal--some have thickeners and water to bulk up 'real food'.
* Baby food is handy, but is best used as a convenience food, not every day for every meal.
* Some manufacturers give full percentage ingredient information on their labels--we'd like to see all companies following their lead.
There's no doubt: it's super-convenient and an absolute godsend when your day is rapidly falling apart or you're moving so fast it's all a blur. But what does baby food in jars and cans really offer--and how is it different from what you'd prepare at home?
After carefully sifting through over 150 jars, cans and frozen cubes of baby food, we can confidently say there's baby food, and then there's real baby food--and spotting the difference between them isn't always easy.
There are only two mainstream manufacturers on the shelves (HEINZ and GOLDEN CIRCLE), plus we found two organic brands (ONLY ORGANIC and BABYNAT) and the frozen newcomer MOTHERLY CUBES. All these brands sell at least some lines that are undoubtedly 100% food--that is, completely made from pureed fruit, vegetables, meat and/or cereals (see right).
What isn't obvious, unless you study the labels carefully, is that some other products contain appreciable amounts of water and thickeners. The problem is that it's almost impossible to work out from many labels exactly how much real food and how much thickened water there is (see Meat and veg, page 37, for more).
Another concern with commercial baby foods is that some parents may, with the best intentions, keep their children on them for too long--or keep them on the really smooth ones without moving on and adding new textures and family finger foods. This can create real problems, as the baby can end up refusing to eat anything that's not soft and mushy, which can mean a time-consuming and often stressful program of retraining.
We looked at all the baby food we could find out there on the shelves, with a focus on cans and jars and their equivalents (we didn't include baby cereal, baby drinks or rusks/bars). Three categories stood out as interesting: mixed meat and vegetable meals, yoghurt desserts and fruit custards--see Tables 1 and 2 on pages 36 and 38 for what we found.
SIMPLE FOODS: 100%
You can buy jars and cans that you can be sure are 100% real food--you just need to choose carefully. Often looking for single ingredients like 'apple' or simple combinations like 'pumpkin and sweetcorn' will reveal products that are simply fruit or vegetable, with some water for the right consistency if the vegetable is starchy or thick (such as corn or potato).
Dietitians like these simple foods too. One concern with mixed baby foods is that they don't always taste different enough from each other or have a similar texture, and a baby who experiences nothing but mixed baby foods never discovers what a carrot or potato really tastes and feels like in itself.
MEAT AND VEG
Just what you get for your money when you buy a meat and veg meal depends to some extent on the brand you buy and the price you're prepared to pay.
Table 1, left, gives the details of all the chicken, beef and fish meals we found on supermarket shelves--and in most cases you only get about 10% chicken or beef (more about fish later). It's what the other 90% or so of the meal consists of that's interesting.
MOTHERLY CUBES and BABYNAT fill the rest of their containers with vegetables, and use water or stock to thin the consistency to something a baby can manage. ONLY ORGANIC relies only on ground rice to thicken some of its products. All the other meals in the table use thickening agents (usually modified maize starch, and often there's more than one) and many also have water as their largest ingredient. Of course, you tend not to pay as much for them--per 100 g, these are about half the price of MOTHERLY CUBES and around a third of the price of BABYNAT.
Thickener being used doesn't automatically mean a poor-quality product: it can help to keep ingredients from separating. The problem is that it's often difficult to directly compare how much 'real' food is in all the meals, because the manufacturers don't have to give the percentage of all the ingredients on the labels. They only have to list them from largest to smallest and tell you about the percentage of the key ones, such as those mentioned in the name of the food.
So if something called 'beef and vegetables' only appears from the ingredients list to be about 50% actual beef and vegetables, how much of the rest of the meal is the rice or split peas that have no labelled percentage, and how much the maize starch used to...
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