These days we learned the sad news of a three-year-old boy who died after choking on a sausage, despite having been taken to the hospital and doctors trying their best to save his life. And in reality, sausages are one of the foods that children drown more easily.
We explain why sausages can be dangerous for children, as well as the measures you can take to avoid that your children run the risk of choking on them.
The main causes of choking in children
According to information from the "Guide for parents on the prevention of unintentional injuries in children's age", published on the page of the Spanish Association of Pediatrics (AEPed), Choking or choking is one of the most common causes of injuries in children between 6 months and 3 years of age.
That is why there are certain foods - such as nuts or those that have bone, such as olives - that it is recommended not to offer until they are four years old, because they are the first cause of choking in children. Similarly, in the above-mentioned guide, it is recommended not give children under three years of any hard food or that does not come apart well as pieces of raw carrot or apple (better to give it in compote or roasted).
Why sausages are dangerous for young children
According to a review of studies published in the Pediatrics magazine in 2010 conducted in the United States, hot dogs, and especially sausages, being soft and not getting rid of salivaThey are foods that can cause choking if they get stuck in the airway. In fact, they eat a lot in that country and it is one of the most common causes of death in young children.
Hot dogs share the physical characteristics described above for high-risk toys. They are cylindrical, the size of the airways and compressible, which allows them to get firmly stuck in a child's hypopharynx and completely occlude the airways.
Other high-risk foods are hard candies and candies, peanuts and nuts, seeds, whole grapes, raw carrots, apples, popcorn, peanut butter pieces, marshmallows (or "clouds" ") and the gum. Many of these foods, such as round candies, grapes, marshmallows and meat / sausages, share the same high-risk physical characteristics that create effective plugs for the infantile airway.
Being a food considered soft or soft, we can believe that sausages are a safe food for children, but precisely because of that, they may not chew them well or enough and then get stuck when they pass through the throat.
When pieces of both sausages and meat are offered to children, we must give them cut into small pieces, but a mistake that parents usually make (more out of habit than for something else), is to cut the sausages only into slices.
The problem in doing this is that the pieces continue to maintain the cylindrical shape and this could clog a child's trachea, as we saw a while ago when a 5-year-old boy choked on a grape because it was not cut into smaller pieces.
What can you do to prevent your children from choking on sausages
What we must do so that our children do not run a greater risk of choking when eating sausages, is to cut them lengthwise, instead of slicing them in width, and then cutting those two strips to that we have the pieces of sausage as half a slice. Even if they are small we can cut them even smaller.
But in addition to offering them in a size that reduces the risk of suffocation when eating them, we must watch that the children eat calmly and without hurries. As with any food, you should avoid jumping, running or talking while eating.
How dangerous are sausages?
A sausage has no greater risk of suffocation than any other food that can clog a child's trachea, such as a grape or an almond. In fact in Spain, asphyxiation in children caused by nuts is more frequent. Therefore, do not stop eating them but cut them properly, and always control the child while eating, both sausages and any other food.
If the child chokes, it is recommended that he cough to expel the piece that is obstructing the trachea. If not, the Heimlich maneuver should be applied.
Personally, I prevent my three-year-old daughter from eating sausages, because in addition to the possible risk of suffocation that exists, it is a very processed food, and a few years ago the World Health Organization (WHO) published a report in which processed meat appeared as carcinogenic to humans. Now this does not mean that if our son eats a sausage, he will have cancer, since he meant that this happened when they were consumed in excess.
In Babies and more We asked nutrition experts about this issue, and they responded that their recommendation was to avoid buying processed products, and in terms of meats, limit their consumption and choose healthier options such as chicken or turkey.
