It’s Maple Time here in New England – Can You Use Maple Syrup in Baby Food Recipes?

Mar 31, 2008 Friendly Baby Food Advice, Substitutes, Sugar, Uncategorized

 It’s one of my favorite times of year,  as the winter turns to spring and the maple trees start giving up their sap,  maple syrup producers all over New England open up their “sugar houses” and invite the public to see just how maple syrup is produced.   I’ve been visiting sugarhouses since I was a wee thing.  While I can’t recall my first taste of pure maple candy, I still get those warm fuzzies whenever I step foot into a sugarhouse.  With the sap boiling over a huge wood-fired open boiler (rare these days as most boilers are oil-fired), it’s warm and toasty and the smell of maple permeates the air.  It’s like being in a maple flavored sauna! 

The maple sugaring season in New England usually lasts about six weeks from mid-February to mid-April, depending on the location. When nighttime temperatures are below freezing and daytime wind chill temperatures rise to 35° F or more, the sap begins to run.  It takes about 40 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup!  For more information about maple syrup around New England, visit this guide offered by the Boston Globe

Alright, about the babies   Babies are able to have maple syrup if you are inclined to drip a bit in oatmeal, sweet potatoes or even squash.  Baked apples drizzled with maple syrup are wonderful too!  Of course, you should use maple syrup sparingly and we’d not recommend it for babies under 10 months old. 

Ooh but it’s a sugar right?  It must be bad for babies!  Well, it’s both bad and good really.  Maple syrup has the following nutrients per 1 tablespoon:

Minerals 
Calcium, Ca  mg 13
Iron, Fe  mg 0.24
Magnesium, Mg  mg 3
Phosphorus, P  mg 0
Potassium, K  mg 41
Sodium, Na  mg 2
Zinc, Zn  mg 0.83
Copper, Cu  mg 0.015
Manganese, Mn  mg 0.660
Selenium, Se  mcg 0.1

Vitamins – none to speak of really

Maple syrup is low on the glycemic index meaning that it does not evalvate your blood sugar – glucose – levels above the norm.  It’s also natural and the body will use what it needs and rid itself of the rest.   Pure maple syrup is better to use as a sweetner than sugar and it is better to slather on pancakes than the fake stuff that is 95% High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) and 5% maple “flavor”.  HFCS is not easily processed or used by the body and may store itself and add fat!

It’s up to you whether you want to drip some maple syrup in your baby’s homemade oatmeal or in a sweet potato puree.  We’re just letting you know it’s safe.  Using maple syrup in a teething biscuit is a great replacement for refined sugar! As always, don’t  sweeten your baby’s foods 100% of the time. 

A Baby’s Sweet Tooth

Feb 21, 2008 Friendly Baby Food Advice, Nutrition, Solids and Weaning, Spices, Sugar

As many worry that introducing sweet potatoes before green beans will make baby grow-up with a monsterous sweet tooth, we posted a snippet from a study that shows the order of solid foods that baby is introduced to really doesn’t matter (keeping in mind potential allergens and age appropriateness that is). 

Today we were looking at old study done in 2002 called Feeding Infants and Toddlers (FITS) which was conducted by Mathematica Policy Research and sponsored by Gerber Products Co.  The study found that “babies and toddlers are also learning early on to indulge their sweet tooth.”  IS this due to parents offering sweet potato before peas or bananas before green beans?  Nope!  Prepare yourself, the following information from the study may shock you!

 FITS found that 10% of 4-to-6-month-olds consume desserts, sweets or sweetened beverages daily and By the time they are 2, 60% of toddlers eat some kind of pastry every day.

Although added sugar was removed from most jarred baby foods in the mid-1990s, baby-food companies continue to offer dessert lines with flavors such as vanilla custard pudding and peach cobbler, loaded with sugar and starch.

Early exposure to intensely sweet foods has long-term consequences, says Amy Lanou, a senior nutrition scientist for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a Washington-based nonprofit. “When we’re really young, our taste buds are especially attuned to sweet flavors. If you’re offered bananas and berries at an early age, that level of sweetness will satisfy. But if you’re given concentrated sweets, a taste for those intense sweets will follow you for the rest of your life.”

So there you have it!  Babies are indeed prone to prefer sweet foods – breast milk is sweet afterall.  Babies will not develop the “bad” sweet tooth unless parents offer them the junk foods that include copious amounts of sugar (not fruit sugars!) and other sweeteners and artifically sweetened foods.

Serve up those Sweet Potatoes and Peaches and Bananas and fear not the development of a sweet tooth!  Offering a variety of foods, both naturally sweet and not,  will help expand and enlighten your baby’s tastebuds.

Other items of interest from the study:

Stevia in Baby Foods – Substitutes for Sugar?

Jan 20, 2008 Spices, Substitutes, Sugar

  This post applies ONLY to sugar in teething biscuits, bread sticks, First Birthday Cakes and other non-meal type foods!  Sugar (and salt) should never be used in your baby’s every day meal foods.  There is no need to sweeten up baby’s applesauce for example!

Arianna wrote to us tonight to ask about using Stevia as a sugar substitute in our website’s teething biscuit recipes page  Stevia is a natural herbal sweetener and it is a member of the Chrysanthemum family.   The National Institutes of Health Clinical Center  (The Clinical Center is home to the National Institutes of Health intramural clinical research program. Located on the NIH Bethesda, Maryland campus, the Clinical Center complex is where clinical biomedical research occurs)     notes that Stevia is a 

“Sweet Leaf of Paraguay (Stevia rebaudiana), extracts from which provide a food sweetener 300 times sweeter than sugar. In Brazilian herbal medicine, stevia is used as a tonic for diabetes, hypertension, and high blood pressure—uses that the Botanic Garden says have been validated in American clinical studies. Danish researchers have demonstrated that stevia may prove useful in the treatment of diabetes.”

The above information was published in 2004 and it’s a bit strange to find the NIH actually “supporting” stevia when the FDA is continuing to try to ban it! More on that later!

At this time, Stevia is not FDA approved for any use as a food additive and as late as Sept. of 2007, the Hain Celestial Group was sent a warning from the FDA to remove stevia  from a few of it’s drinks!  The FDA stated in it’s letter “that although it has received requests to use stevia in food, “data and information necessary to support the safe use have been lacking.”   If you delve a bit into the Stevia vs. FDA issue, you will find few studies of credibility indicating stevia is dangerous and deserving of a ban.  However, there are studies that have indicated possible carcinogenic, teratologic and mutogenic affects of stevia and steviosides.  It’s interesting to note that some indegineous people of Paraguay use stevia leaves (eaten or made into a drink) as a contraception – this would seem to indicate some sort of fertility issue with consuming stevis……but again, I digress…………………

All cultures that use stevia do not use it as the US would if it were approved.  Using stevia as a sweetener in the sweet foods and drinks that are copiously consumed in the US might have dangerous implications.  Societies that use stevia use it in small quanties in foods that are not consumed on a daily basis or in copious amounts.  

It is plausible that using stevia (which is MUCH cheaper than aspartame or sucralose) in sodas for example could cause negative health issues!  So, stevia is sold in the US as a “dietary supplement” and not as an approved food additive or approved supplement.  This label of “dietary supplement” is kinda like a caveat emptor – buyer beware;  if you get sick from stevia or if you get cancer from stevia, we’re not responsible because the FDA has termed it a dietary supplement.

Ok, I’m getting to the point!  I’d not recommend using aspartame, sucralose or sacchrine as a substitute in teething biscuit recipes for babies.   I would not therefore recommend using stevia either.  There are many herbs that should not be offered to infants due to side effects and since the information about stevia is so sketchy and surrounded in controversy, I’d err on the side of caution.  Skip the sugar if you want or read our Sugar Substitutes for Baby Foods page and learn about Agave, Brown Rice Syrup or Maple Syrup.  In the end, when a 1/2 cup of sugar is called for in a teething biscuit recipe and your baby eats a small crumb of the biscuit,  I find it better to use natural organic, unbleached, pressed granulated cane sugar!  You should try it in all your recipes that call for sugar when you can’t use a syrup!

WHO Stevia Study  Very Interesting!