No fruit juice for kids under 1

Children should not be given fruit juice before they are 1 year old unless it’s advised by a doctor, according to new guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

The group had previously advised parents to wait to offer juice until a child reached 6 months old but decided to make the change based on rising rates of obesity and concerns about tooth cavities.

“We couldn’t really see any reason why juice was still part of the potential recommendation for 6- to 12-month-old kids,” said Dr. Steven A. Abrams, chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas, and co-author of the policy statement. “We recommend breastfeeding or formula in that age group, and there really isn’t any need or beneficial role for juice, so we kind of made that adjustment.”

It is the first change to the academy’s fruit juice recommendations since 2001.

It wasn’t “some magical new science” that inspired the alteration, noted Abrams, but rather “this (guideline) hadn’t been looked at in a long time, so we thought it was time to take a close look.”