The upside of your children going to school is that you
finally get a little time for yourself. Ok, that time tends to be almost
entirely occupied by work but at least work tends not to scream and stamp its
feet quite as much as a four year old.
The downside of Marty going to school though is that we lose
a little control. Ok, I’m no control freak so this isn’t a big deal but I do
worry… about sugar.
Don’t get me wrong, sugar is wonderful stuff. It’s a
terrific and completely natural source of energy. We are all hard wired to find
sugar delicious. In fact, from a biological point of view, it pretty much
defines the word ‘delicious’. You could scrape up something from the darkest
recesses of your drains and by coating it in enough sugar make it taste
appealing – a fact that has not been over looked by the food industry.
Given half a chance all of us would gladly gorge ourselves
on sugary foods, we’re pre-programmed to do it and it would take an awful lot
of effort to deny this entirely natural drive. Of course, for hundreds of
thousands of years this was not a problem. Most sugar was only seasonally
available and you had to either dig it up, wait for it to drop from a tree or
be prepared to take on an awful lot of bees if you wanted to get at it.
Times changed but sugar stubbornly remained a luxury and a
rare treat until the 1950’s when cheap corn syrup suddenly erupted onto the
scene. All of a sudden we really could get as much as we wanted, which would
have been fine if it wasn’t for the fact that we wanted a lot…. an awful lot.
The food industry quickly realised that this cheap additive
could make damp cardboard taste delicious, so why not make it taste super
delicious? Before long pretty much every processed food product contained added
sugar. Worse still, was the effect sugar had on drinks; why make a cola that
tastes ok with 4 teaspoons of sugar, when you can make it taste great with 8
teaspoons full?
And then came the most audacious marketing campaign in
recent history, the “High Energy Drink”. Here we have a population already
saturated with cheap sugar, a population that needs extra ‘energy’ like a fish
needs a bike. Yet they somehow managed to con the majority of the population
into thinking that their sporting ability would be enhanced if only they
consumed a bit more sugar – and a bit of salt and a few things with long Latin
names just to make it all look scientific!
It’s truly amazing! To get any benefit from these drinks
you’d have to be jogging to Aberdeen twice a week – the caveat being that you
don’t already live in Aberdeen. Seriously, you really need to be pushing
yourself to the physical edge to get any genuine benefit from these drinks yet
I’ve seen small boys knocking back these drinks just because they’ve kicked a
football around a field for a bit! No child should be subjecting their bodies
to the sort of demands that a high energy drink is designed for, yet, because of this marketing, they feel under pressure to use them, with the
result that the poor souls are leaving the football pitch a little fatter than
when they jogged on to it.
As a parent a lot of things worry me, it’s part and parcel
of the job. The fact that Marty’s generation is predicted to be the first
western generation to have a lower standard of living than their parents is a
worry – although we’ve set the bar pretty low so he should be able to just edge
us. Another, far bigger worry, is that his generation will likely be the first to
suffer a drop in life expectancy.
There are a lot of factors at play here, not
least of which is that governments around the world seem to have decided that
they are not responsible for anything any more and that they should just leave
the world to the capitalists. In some areas this might be sane but when it
comes to science it’s idiocy; when profit is the driving force behind research
a breakthrough in new antibiotics is going to come way behind a cure for
baldness, 3D TV’s and perkier boobs. As our antibiotics become less and less
effective life expectancy will plummet. As if this wasn’t bad enough we
exacerbate the problem by deliberately making ourselves unhealthy.
I say deliberately because it is completely unnecessary;
when a young child is thirsty their bodies are craving water. If you give them
water, the thirst goes and the association between water and thirst is
strengthened, so water actually starts to taste good. Alas, a huge amount of
parents in the west feel that water is somehow inadequate so they add some
fruit juice – which must be good for them because it’s got the word ‘fruit’ in
it. As a result, the child grows up associating sugary drinks with thirst.
Every time they feel thirsty they drink sugar, quite a bit of it because it’s
not as good at quenching thirst. So every time they satisfy their thirst they
take on board 100’s of calories that they have absolutely no need for. Keep
this up for just a few years and you have a child who, through absolutely no
fault of their own, is overweight. At which point society turns around and
starts blaming and name calling with mindless enthusiasm.
Ok, sugar isn’t the only culprit in the rise of obesity but
is it the main player primarily because the majority of people still view sugar
through rose tinted glasses. We wouldn’t celebrate an event in our child’s life
by handing out fags or dishing up great lumps of lard but we will immediately
reach for the sugar.
‘Oh there’s no comparison between sugar and fat and fags!” I
hear you say. Well you may be right but, in the early part of the 20th century,
cigarettes were regarded as a cure-all for pretty much everything and foods
with a high fat content were our everyday treats. Tobacco and fat haven’t
changed since those days, just our attitude; we realised the dangers and moved
away from them.
The same thing is starting to happen with sugar and I
suspect that in 20 years’ time it will be quite rare to see a parent giving a
child a can of coke or a bag of sweets. Alas, Marty is four so if we leave it
to society alone it’s going to come too late for him.
So we’ve been fighting our own little fight, not to avoid
sugar completely but to keep it to a bare minimum, and educate Marty about the
downside to this glorious sweetness. Sadly, this fight gets that much harder
once they start school. It’s not really a problem with the school itself,
although many do seem to have a rather outdated attitude to sugar, rather it’s
the other parents, many of whom don’t seem to share our concern.
Virtually every little event in a young person’s life seems
to be celebrated by swamping them and their friends in sugary treats, so much
so that it’s not really a treat anymore, it’s become commonplace. If we’d left
Marty to his own devices his sugar intake would have quadrupled since he
started school!
The huge problem with this is that, whilst it’s relatively
easy to keep a small child away from sugar, it is very, very, hard to get them
to cut back on sugar once they’ve got a taste for it. The other long term
problem is that of ‘association’. A number of fast food companies have gone to
great lengths to associate their products with the good times of childhood
because they know that the food habits and associations formed in childhood
tend to stay with us for the rest of our lives. If your child grows up eating
healthily the odds are they will always eat healthily. If they grow up
regarding sugar as a treat and a mark of the ‘good times’ it will be the first
thing they reach for in adulthood when they are feeling fed up and depressed,
that or the burger that reminds them of childhood parties.
Of course this is no reason to demonise sugar, or burgers
for that matter, but if our children are going to grow up healthily they need
to learn to avoid sugary foods in much the same way as we’ve already learnt to
avoid fatty foods. We wouldn’t give a child a tub of lard for their birthday so think twice about giving them a bowl of sugar, even if that sugar is hidden in colourful
jelly, and what ever you do, don't give them yet more sugar to quench their thirst afterwards.
