Baby Food FACTS – Nutrition and marketing of baby and toddler food and drinks

Birth to age 2 is a critical period for establishing lifelong and healthy dietary preferences and eating habits and preventing childhood obesity. The information that parents receive about feeding their young children, including from marketing, should consistently correspond with advice from health professionals about practices that help children grow up at a healthy weight. However, baby and toddler food and drink products and the marketing messages used to promote them do not always support experts’ recommendations for feeding babies and toddlers.

In this report, we examine the nutritional quality and other characteristics of food and drink products marketed to parents for their babies and toddlers (up to age 3), as well as the messages used to promote these products, and evaluate how well they correspond to expert advice about feeding young children.