Ryan Walker from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Michael Goran from the University of Southern California sought to determine actual sugar content and composition in commonly used infant formulas, baby foods, and other grocery items frequently marketed towards children. After looking through the online shopping databases for three of the U.S.’s largest grocery retailers – Walmart, SuperValu, and Safeway – they selected every tenth product from infant formulas, baby food, yogurt, breakfast cereal, and packaged baked goods and purchased all products from the retailers in a defined zip-code region in Los Angeles to help control for location and inventory. Twenty products per category were chosen for analysis. The results were not pretty The average percent of total calories supplied by sugar in infant formulas was 27.4%, with five having greater than 40%. Since most formula attempts to mimic breast milk, it was no surprise that most were...
