'Sugar Smart' app reveals sugar content in children's food and drink

Parents across the UK are being urged to sign up for a free mobile app which provides information on the content in food and drink.

The ‘Sugar Smart’ app from Public Health England (PHE) works by scanning barcodes and revealing total sugar in cubes or grams.

Dr Alison Tedstone, chief nutritionist from PHE, has suggested that children are having too much sugar in their diets, leading to painful tooth decay, weight gain and the potential for serious health problems in later life.

She said: "If there's one thing I'd strongly encourage parents to do, it’s to swap sugary drinks out of their kids' diets for either a low-sugar drink or water or low-fat milk, which would be a really excellent choice."

PHE’S new Change4Life advertising campaign, which includes the sugar app, suggests that on average, children aged four to ten years old are consuming 22kg of added sugar a year. This is equivalent to 5,500 sugar cubes - more than the weight of an average five-year-old child.

As the ‘Sugar Smart’ app launches, Diabetes UK is highlighting the urgent need for the Government to put a number of measures in place to help tackle the national obesity crisis.

A fifth of four-to-five year olds are overweight or obese

Officials now suggest that a fifth of four-to-five year olds are overweight or obese. Consuming too much sugar can lead to painful tooth decay, weight gain and obesity. This can also affect children’s well-being making them more likely to have low self-esteem.

Being overweight as a child also increases the chance of the individual being overweight as an adult, putting them at risk of serious health problems, including: Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.

Dr Tedstone, added: “Children aged five shouldn’t have more than 19 grams of sugar per day – that’s five cubes, but it’s very easy to have more. That’s why we want parents to be ‘Sugar Smart’.”

Most recently, the Prime Minister, David Cameron suggested that the Government could soon introduce a levy on fizzy drinks after promising to tackle soaring obesity rates in the UK.

Around 30 per cent of the sugar in children’s diets comes from sugary drinks, such as fizzy pop, juice drinks, squashes, cordials, energy drinks and juice.

Professor David Haslam, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said: “Anything less than a 50 per cent tax on sugary drinks will be insufficient as a disincentive to consumers.

“We don’t currently support taxing food product, but sugary drinks have no place in anyone’s diet.”

It has been recommended by the NHS that a child aged between four and six-years-old should have a maximum of five cubes or 19 grams of added sugar a day.

The Sugar Smart app has been developed to raise awareness of how much sugar is contained in everyday food and drink.

It works on more than 75,000 products, offering a quick guide to help parents to assess potential purchases that may harm their children's health.

'The average child consumes three times the recommended daily amount of sugar'

Chris Askew, chief executive at Diabetes UK, said: “Diets that are high in sugar are fuelling the rise in obesity, and in turn the dramatic rise in Type 2 diabetes, a serious health condition that can lead to devastating complications such as blindness, amputations and stroke. This is unlike Type 1 diabetes which cannot be prevented and is not caused by being obese.

“With the average child consuming three times the recommended daily amount of sugar, the need for action has never been more urgent. The new Sugar Smart app will help parents to understand and take control of their children’s sugar intake.

“However, the app alone is not enough to achieve the reduction in sugar intake we need to see across the population. We need to see the Government act on recommendations made by Public Health England, including restricting marketing of unhealthy foods to children, reducing and rebalancing the number of price promotions offered on unhealthy foods, implementing a clear and transparent programme for reformulating unhealthy foods and reducing portion sizes.

“People also need to be supported to undertake regular physical activity and supported to choose healthier foods, including through a clear and consistent food labelling system.

“Until we get better at helping people to live healthy and active lives by taking a number of necessary measures, the rise in obesity will continue to see cases of Type 2 diabetes soar at an alarming rate, costing not only human lives but also crippling the already overstretched NHS.”

For more information on the Change4Life Sugar Smart app visit: http://www.nhs.uk/change4life/Pages/change-for-life.aspx.