He said: "It would have a detrimental effect on the community and the local economy.
Alongside savoury products, companies also sell pouches containing only fruit, which are leaving dentists concerned about the potential for tooth decay.The NHS says an infant should have as little sugar as possible, and that a one-year-old child should have no more than 10g of free sugars a day.
Free sugars occur when fruit is pureed, as is the case with the pouches. Unlike eating fresh fruit - which is much better for a child - pureeing releases sugar from inside fruit cell walls and can be absorbed much more quickly.A recent British Dental Association (BDA) report, shared exclusively with the BBC, indicated that 37 of 60 fruit pouches found on supermarket shelves contained more free sugar than this 10g guideline.The NHS says eating too many free sugars can also lead to weight gain.
Children who are "barely out of weaning" are coming to hospital for multiple tooth extractions because of tooth decay caused by their diets, said Eddie Crouch, BDA chair."It's obviously not all down to these pouches," he added. "But clearly, regular use and feeding with these pouches with such high levels of sugar cause serious problems to the general health of children as they're growing up."
Some pouches contain higher levels of sugar than some fizzy drinks. The highest found by the BBC was Ella's Kitchen's Bananas and Apples, which has 19.6g of sugar - equivalent to more than four teaspoons.
At the same time, Ella's Kitchen - as well as Lidl, Aldi, Piccolo and Heinz - label their products as containing "no added sugar".Over the last week, as part of a series on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, we traced the path of migrants from Turkey to Bulgaria to the rest of Europe - the “biggest growth route” for those travelling into Europe, according to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory - in search of what it will really take to “smash the gangs”.
When we talk about smuggling gangs, we tend to focus on the end of the process, such as the UK's relations with France, and on the movement of people across the English Channel, but our route marks the start of the journey: it’s where migrants first enter Europe.Along the way, we spoke to migrants who shared their complicated reasons for putting their lives in the hands of people smugglers. What soon became clear was the sheer magnitude of the government’s task.
The crowded shopping bazaar in the Istanbul district of Esenyurt is popular with the thousands of Syrian refugees who live in the region. “You can see Syrian shops here,” Husam, a Syrian refugee, told us as he showed us around after Friday prayers. “Many were not here in 2015. You have falafel, shawarma - many shops for Syrian food. It was a comfortable, safe place for Syrians.” But now the mood is darkening.“In the past few years it’s not safe any more,” he explains. “There are groups of racist people who don’t like refugees. On public transportation you cannot speak comfortably in Arabic on your phone. People are attacked [for] speaking Arabic.”