NEARLY half the baby foods sold in shops are packed with tooth-damaging sugar and are bulked up with starch, research by an international consumers' group and the Sunday Morning Post has found. About 40 per cent of foods - including savoury meals - contain sugar or sweet fruit juice, and the same proportion have starch additives that can pad out a meal so there is less 'real' food in it, the British Consumers' Association said after studying 420 baby foods. The Post checked the labels of the most popular brands in Hong Kong, with similar results. Heinz Tutti-Frutti dessert contains more sugar and more corn starch than fruit, and the spaghetti with meat sauce, which has more tomato than spaghetti or beef, also contains added salt and corn starch. 'Sweet foods may encourage a sweet tooth, and it's important to avoid sugars to help prevent tooth decay when the first teeth start coming through,' the association's Which? magazine said. 'Some sugars can damage teeth; this includes 'natural' sugars in fruit juice which are released in processing, and sugar in honey.' The consumer association also recommended against buying baby food containing starch, gums or maltodextrin. 'These additives can stop food separating out but critics feel that because they absorb water, this can pad out the meal so there's less 'real' food in it,' the association said. In other popular baby food brands available here, the Post found that Gerber's banana apple dessert has added sugar, corn starch and orange juice, and its vegetable beef meal contains rice flour, wheat flour and potato flour. In dried baby foods, Nestle's apple infant cereal has more sugar than apple, Milupa's mixed vegetable powder contains more of the thickener maltodextrin than vegetables, and Milupa's mixed fruit milk cereal has added sucrose, or sugar. Farley's pure baby cereal bought in Wellcome contained no sugar or starch, but the British study found that all Farley's breakfasts and desserts available there contained sugar, and several meals in the range contained starches and juices. Queen Mary Hospital's dietetics department manager Pauline Ng Po-yee said sales of shop-bought baby food were increasing. She urged parents to get into the habit of checking labels before buying. 'The trend is going up because there are more working mothers and they usually rely on their domestic helpers to feed,' she said. 'They must try to read the labels and the nutritional value.' Ms Ng said infants on their first solids should always be given foods without salt, sugar and starch, but that small amounts were fine for older babies, especially if they were given water afterwards to rinse their teeth. She said the theory that home-cooked meals were better than shop-bought food often did not apply in Hong Kong. 'Some of the traditional Chinese ways of cooking are just to make a bit of meat on top of rice, and they will give the baby the gravy only, which is not that good. 'If food's from the jar, you know that they're getting the proper proportions.' Few of the meals bought in Hong Kong contained salt, which has been under the spotlight since the death of a three-month-old British boy last year from excess salt in the adult breakfast cereal his young parents fed him every meal. And not all the local foods were packed with additives; Heinz Applesauce contains only apples, and Gerber's apple sauce only apple, water and vitamin C. Graphic: BABY11GET