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I've come across a number of food products that have some alcohol ranging from .04% to 2% they often don't have warnings and you only find by going through the ingredients.

Some examples

  • deserts
  • marzipan
  • miso paste

If you give one of these lollies to a child will the alcohol cause harm or is it too low to have an effect.

E.g. Is a 20 gram marzipan at .04% alcohol dangerous for a child? I would also like some way to calculate this.

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  • Hello, I upvoted. I suggest to add data of what is the age of children you mean to --- perhaps, what is the maximal age (5 year old will greatly differ from 10-11 as you probably now).
    – user8225
    Feb 8, 2020 at 2:20
  • There are 2 questions here: 1) Can the amount of alcohol found in foods affect child's psychomotor functions in the sense making him/her "drunk?" 2) Can regular consumption of foods with alcohol have any organic damage, aka fatty liver, etc.?
    – Jan
    Feb 10, 2020 at 8:26

1 Answer 1

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Google "alcohol content of bread" and you'll see:

1.9%
Alcohol. However, during the baking process, most of the alcohol in the dough evaporates into the atmosphere. This is basically the same thing that happens to much of the water in the dough as well. And it has long been known that bread contains residual alcohol, up to 1.9% of it. Aug 3, 2017

www.forbes.com › sites › quora › 2017/08/03 › why-isnt-bread-alcoholic
Why Isn't Bread Alcoholic? - Forbes

The next time you feed your child a PB&J sandwich, be aware that the bread will contain up to 2% alcohol.

But also know that one would have to eat a lot of bread to get enough alcohol to have any significant symptoms of drunkenness.

And even then it simply wouldn't happen. Eating bread before drinking is a traditional way of avoiding drunkenness, or at least reducing the peak level of blood alcohol. The alcohol is absorbed by the bread and rather than directly entering the bloodstream (as it would on an empty stomach), it is released slowly over a period of several hours.

Children have been eating bread for thousands of years without any recorded bad effects from its alcohol content.

But consider other food products. Vanilla extract for example is required to have at least 35% alcohol, and it can be much higher than that. Even so, no one worries about feeding vanilla flavoured desserts to children.

That the concentration within that one ingredient is very high doesn't matter. It's the total amount of alcohol in the final product that counts, and no one is ever going to add so much vanilla extract that it would make a significant contribution.

Similarly with things like marzipan and miso paste. It would be almost impossible for a child to eat sufficiently huge quantities of these products that the total alcohol consumed would be significant.

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