Posted: 2/22/2010 5:33:26 PM EDT
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Globe and Mail Update Published on Monday, Feb. 22, 2010 11:54AM EST The hot dog may be a saviour for time-pressed parents and a favourite among picky eaters, but a respected health body says it can also be a serious danger to children. The American Academy of Pediatrics identified the hot dog as the greatest food-related choking hazard to children in a policy statement released yesterday. “If you were to design the perfect plug for a child's airway, you couldn't do much better than a hot dog,” Gary Smith, lead author of the statement and professor of pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine, said in a release. “It will wedge itself in tightly and completely block the airway, causing the child to die within minutes because of lack of oxygen.” One of the academy's proposed solutions? Design a better wiener. Rather than putting the greatest onus on parents to make smart choices about what they serve their children, the academy recommended that manufacturers rethink product design and include warning labels on high-risk foods to reduce incidents of choking.  While hot dogs are the worst offenders, the academy also identified hard candy, nuts, grapes, popcorn, marshmallows, peanut butter, chewing gum and raw carrots as dangerous for young children. John Lepp, a father of two from Waterdown, Ont., had a major scare two summers ago when his daughter, then 2, got a piece of baby carrot stuck in her windpipe. She was airlifted from Haliburton, Ont., to Toronto for surgery. While the incident made him nervous about feeding his daughter baby carrots, Mr. Lepp says that calling for a redesign of so-called hazardous foods is overblown. Now, he simply cuts up his daughters' food into small pieces and makes sure he watches them closely when they eat. “Isn't it common sense?” he asks. “I've stopped listening to this stuff. If I did listen to it, we'd be scared to eat and drink everything.” Almost half of the 380 children 14 and under in Canada who are sent to hospital annually for serious injury have choked on food, according to data collected from 2000 to 2005 by the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program. The American Academy of Pediatrics suspects that choking incidents in the U.S. are underreported. In addition to action by food manufacturers, it also called for a better surveillance and reporting system for choking incidents. Kristen Gane, co-ordinator of programs for Safe Kids Canada, an initiative run by Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, says parents should avoid serving kids hard foods such as carrots, popcorn and hot dogs until they are 3 and have learned to chew properly. But even softer foods can be choking hazards if eaten too quickly. Torontonian Theresa Albert, 44, jokes that her daughter, Jamie, is “the most over-watched food kid.” Ms. Albert says she can't help being an overprotective mom –– she was traumatized when she watched her little sister choke on food when she was a kid herself. She was at her sister's sixth birthday party at a pizza place in Peterborough, Ont., scarfing down slices of double-cheese pizza. Her mother noticed her sister had stopped chewing and realized the girl was choking. After a few panicked minutes on the floor, her mother was able to pull out a 20-centimetre-long string of cheese from the six-year-old's throat. “It was as defining moment,” Ms. Albert says. “At the table, we get a false sense of security. We give [kids] little pieces of things and walk away. ... Anything from a size and shape perspective can cause choking.” When her daughter was younger, she cut up tofu dogs into small triangles to prevent choking. Instead of slicing bananas, she mashed them up. And she always steamed or boiled carrots to soften them. At Green Apple Kids, a Toronto child-care centre, co-owner Bernadette Testani says there has never been a case of choking at her centre, largely because of smart food preparation. “[For hot dogs], we definitely cut them sideways so they don't pose as much of a choking hazard. With bananas, we cut them in half. ... [The caterers] don't send over grapes that often and they're cut in half for children,” she says. She dismisses the idea of redesigning food as an appropriate solution to food-related choking. “You can't redesign grapes. And what do you do with peanut butter then? I don't think that's the right way to go,” she says. Ms. Testani says parents and child-care providers must instead watch children while they're eating. “We're monitoring the children very, very closely,” she says. “The key is sitting the children down and having them focused on eating rather than running around.” |
