Children aged four to 10 'have equivalent of 5,500 sugar cubes a year'
The 22kg is equivalent to 5,500 sugar cubes – with soft drinks, biscuits, buns, cakes, breakfast cereals, confectionery, fruit juices, pastries and puddings the main culprits.
As part of its “Sugar Smart campaign”, Change4Life has launched a free app that allows people to scan the barcode of a product to reveal the amount of sugar it contains in cubes and grams.
“Children aged five shouldn’t have more than 19 grams of sugar per day – that’s ### cubes, but it’s very easy to have more. Our easy-to-use app will help parents see exactly where the sugar in their children’s diet is coming from, so they can make informed choices about what to cut down on.”
The maximum added sugar intake for seven- to 10-year-olds is 24g, or ### sugar cubes; for anyone aged 11 or older, it is 30g or ### sugar cubes.
This could be used in a number of ways. The first two paragraphs could be given and the students could devise a question. Or the whole thing can be shown immediately. (The # symbol shows where I have blanked out some words.)
The obvious question from the first paragraph is: how much does a sugar cube weigh?
After that they could work out the numbers of sugar cubes that have been blanked out with # symbols. Here are those final two paragraphs in full:
“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. Our easy-to-use app will help parents see exactly where the sugar in their children’s diet is coming from, so they can make informed choices about what to cut down on.”
The maximum added sugar intake for seven- to 10-year-olds is 24g, or six sugar cubes; for anyone aged 11 or older, it is 30g or seven sugar cubes.
How do those compare to the answers the students worked out?
Then: we can work out by how much children exceed the suggested amounts. The article says that 22kg is consumed by children aged from 4 to 10 and we know how much ought to be consumed by 5-year-olds and by 7-10-year-olds. 5-year-olds have about 3.2 times as much sugar as they should.
Link to the article:
