Parents are being urged to sign up for a free app which tells them the sugar content of food and booze.
The “sugar smart app”, from Public Health England, acts by scanning barcodes and uncovering total sugar in cubes or grams.
Officials hope it will help combat tooth decay, obesity and type two diabetes and help families to choose healthier alternatives.
PHE says young children are ingesting three times more than the sugar limit.
Its new Change4Life advertising campaign, which includes the sugar app, been shown that on average progenies aged four to ten years old are downing 22 kg of added sugar a year.
That’s about 5,500 sugar cubes – more than the heavines of an average five-year-old child.
The app has been developed to raise awareness of how much sugar is contained in everyday food and booze.
It works on more than 75,000 commodities, offering a quick template to help parents to assess potential purchases that may harm their children’s health.
How much sugar?
a can of cola – nine cubes of sugar a chocolate bar – six cubes of sugar a small container of juice – more than five cubes of sugar