A blog by Dr Kawther Hashem, Campaign Lead at Action on Sugar

You know those products that sound healthy? The ones with all the convincing marketing claims such as ‘no added sugar’, ‘fruit made fun’, ‘made with real fruit’, ‘1 of your 5 a day’ or ‘perfect for little lunchboxes’, yet when you open the pack, they have a cunning resemblance to Haribo, strawberry laces or pencil sweets. They are sweet, sticky and colourful. That is because they are sweets, not so-called ‘fruit snacks’.

Sugar in sweets comes from sugar cane or sugar beet, a natural source, grown in the ground, it wasn’t made in a lab somewhere. Similarly, the sugar from mashed, bashed, squeezed and blended fruit, is the same. It comes from a natural source, the fruit, grown in the ground, bushes or trees, yet when it’s processed it doesn’t make it much different from the sugar taken out of beet and put in sweets. 

I am pretty sure my dentist friends would agree, they would prefer kids ate sweets (including fruit snacks) in one single sitting at a meal time, rather than keep exposing their little teeth to numerous small attacks every single day, which is even more likely when they are marketed as a ‘snack’.  In between meal times is literally the worse time to eat them, as they bind and trap sugars on and around the tooth making kid’s teeth more susceptible to tooth decay – especially as kids are less likely to brush their teeth, let alone floss too, to get all that sticky stuff off.

What is even worse, compared with when we looked at these products in 2015, some seem to have gone up in sugars content too. Just why? Why would you do that? Did you just want to make sure it really was competing with sweets that much?

If in any doubt, give sweet foods less often to kids, because unlike what the marketing teams in companies want you to think, these processed fruit snacks are not equal to fruit, even if they ‘contain’ fruit.  When we talk about giving fruit to kids, giving it whole or chopped is best, not when they are disguised as sweets.

So let’s not kid ourselves, or our kids, anymore.  These are overpriced, convenient and make us feel a little bit better about offering a snack to a child, but they are not healthy and definitely not tooth friendly.