The change for life reduce sugar campaign is irritating me

[Hurr1cane]

Fair enough change sugary cereals for less sugary ones like porridge, but it depends what type of porridge clearly.

Fair enough change chocolate bars for rice cakes... But again... It depends what type, some are full of salt and sugar.

But change cordial for sugar free cordial? Really? I make an effort to make sure I only buy cordial with sugar in and not asphartemine, horrible stuff that sends DS completely high. But to be honest I'd much rather replace with watered down fruit juice or even just water, the cordial is only used for a treat or when he's poorly and I need to get fluids down him, but I never ever use sugar free.

It just seems like pointless, vague, bad advice, and yes all children in DSs school were given the full packs.

I'm probably being unreasonable because of how badly DS reacts to that particular sweetner, but the pharmacist tells me that isn't a rare thing at all, and the sweetner is in all the calpol type medicines instead of sugar, which means DS is either poorly and having seizures, or completely high and giving himself seizures, so the advice for sugar free cordial really pissed me off.

I am being aren't I?

"Lidl do proper sugar in cordial and yoghurt"
actually they do not, it is glucose fructose syrup....but that's a whole nother fred

Agree with you op, drives me up the wall. My friends are always going on about low fat this and that, low sugar drinks etc and I just wonder when people are going to realise it is utter crap. Portion size is key, not processed fake versions of perfectly good food.

I love the Belvoir elderflower cordial which I dilute with sparkling water. Sooo thirst quenching.
I hate Aspartame and co. My in laws worship artifical sweeteners. They also buy Elmlea and low fat cheese.
I managed to convert my parents back onto full fat milk and butter. Yay!!

If you want supermarket orange squash that is aspartame free go for the High Juice. Both the Co-op and Tesco high juice only have sugar in for sweetness. Tesco have changed the name to 50% fruit juice orange squash now. Either Tesco no longer stock the Robinson's High Juice or they have stopped making it.

The campaign is utterly stupid and ill-informed.

Why not suggest people eat less shite and subsidise activities instead? In fact all the money wasted on this crap could have been put into something to get kids (and adults) more active. Plus telling people what to do is a sure fire way to get their backs up and make them do the opposite.

YANBU. It really pisses me off! Luckily I don't have a TV so only see it when I visit people with one but the sugar-free and fat-free ads drive me mad.

Also, fat free: Kids need fat in their diets!

I hate the fact that they peddle this out in schools and the parents have no say in it what-so-ever. And then they wonder why more children are become obsessed with what they are eating.
The adult part of C4L is similar. Or it was when I did their questionnaire thing a year or so ago out of curiosity.

DP bought some of those SW yoghurts yesterday, the ingredients list makes me cringe. I'm a vegetarian and they have gelatine in, so I'll pass.

Frik Bad and good food drives me potty too. Along with "Oh, I'm being a bit naughty...." No, you are having food that's a little higher in sugar and fat than usual, that's not "naughty".

Lettice DP and I eat mostly home made things now. However a few years ago we ate a lot of convinience foods and when we did start cooking more when we moved in together, we both found that our tastes changed and we didn't crave sugar or salt so much any more. DP was having numerous chocolate bars a day at uni, we both had tea with two or three sugars, etc. Now we feel a bit crap if we eat a significant amount of junk food. A lot of convinience foods taste really salty or sweet for no apparent reason. I swear I can 'taste' chemicals in these yoghurts and cakes and things, more in the sense that the product just doesn't seem right to me.

Mosanto are horrid. Whilst there is a lot of scaremongering about them, a lot of that scaremongering is based on some quite scary facts about them, but people are reluctant to believe it or look into it when the people they hear it from are usually saying it in a scaremongering or conspiracy theorist type way. IYSWIM?

Lorraine Kelly just asked Glynis Barbour who was promoting her play about cutting out sugar must be Itv's campaign what bollocks

I avoid any "diet" that says "suddenly stop eating something you are used to eating and see how long you last". It's like everything, in moderation it's fine.
I'm guessing it's to do with the huge diabetes-detecting drive in the NHS at the mo.

I have a friend who's a dentist, and she never gives her kids (who are 6 and 4) anything "sugar-free", not even Calpol - her view is at least if they have the sugar version she knows what they are getting, as sugar is a natural product that you can moderate, whereas sweeteners could be any number of chemicals.

I have followed her advice with no ill effects so far.

I am afraid I am not a fan of the sugar free movement.

I have recently actually moved away from spreads and gone back to real butter - for example.

I am trying instead to eat healthier overall and to keep the "not so good" things to moderate amounts. So I will have real cheese, and tasty cheese - but if I get vintage cheddar there is a depth of flavor to it so I only actually want a little bit. Or I will buy a decent handful of Leonidas orangettes and savour 1 or 2 of those with a cup of tea when I want a chocolate hit (a bag last us about 2-3 weeks in our house. often even longer) rather than a full bar of Cadbury mediocrity. Or a really nice bag of sharing crisps (I like a couple of the M&S types in particular) but take a handful in a bowl and put a clip on the bag.

I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables (more veg than fruit), and we try to have fish at least weekly as well. I try to cook healthily - baking things a lot rather than frying for example. But I will have a bag of nuts (cashews or pistachios usually) in my desk at work to nibble on, I include half an avocado in my salad lunches for healthy fats and nutrients, I serve wilted spinach as a side vegetable for iron or have a couple of slices of liver maybe once a fortnight.

I am not perfect. But I really hate the taste of articifial sweeteners and they do affect DD's ADHD in a bad way too. We tend to drink a lot of water, but we also have sugar squashes too. DD drinks full fat milk, although DH drinks low fat, and I have skimmed at work (drink whatever I find at home in tea/coffee).

I've found that since I changed my habits a couple of years ago, I am far less likely to binge on food (not utterly binge, but eat too much even when I felt full, like cravings I suppose). I now eat nice food but stop when I am full. I eat a wider range of foods, including getting a lot more vegetables into our diet. I do dishes with double cream in them, but only every few weeks. I occasionally have chips, or the skin off a roast chicken. But I don't eat much bread, and I have a far more balanced diet than I used to and I feel a lot better on it. I have more energy, and while I don't do enough exercise to get me truly fit and healthy, I am losing weight slowly and I enjoy my food. I do have peaks and troughs - it was pretty damn stressful at both work and home earlier this year so I was comfort eating again and put on about a stone - but I have lost 10 lbs in the past 3 months (I stood on the scales this morning and have lost the 2 again that I put on over Christmas). I still have a stone to go before I am happy, and another stone before I am in the "healthy" BMI - but I was in the obese category a while back. And I don't feel that I am depriving myself because I am still eating nice foods - just making sure I enjoy them in small enough portions.

Another point about this Govt funded "healthy eating advice" re switching to artificially sweetened products is it promotes the idea that drinking fizzy drinks/sweet drinks, and highly processed foods is "normal".

i.e. eating what suits big business and their marketing companies, is the best advice they can give us, and the general public would feel like they are being deprived if they were advised not to eat sweets and drink fizzy drink.

Reiterating what another poster said up thread "I am old enough to have lived through eggs are good for you, eggs are bad for you, eggs are good for you again eras as well as phases of all fat is bad, some fat is bad, some fat is good, some fat is really bad, fibre is good, fibre gives you cancer, fibre stops you getting cancer, carbs are good, carbs are bad etc etc."

The one thing that hasn't changed through all these periods of govt sponsored dietry "advice" is eating too many highly processed foods is what is deteriorating our health. Whether that is margarine, high sugar content foods, high salt, high trans fat, lots of chemicals as ingredients etc - it is these products that are eroding our health as a nation.

And still the govt PROMOTES these highly processed foods full of unreadable ingredients foods as HEALTHY alternatives, simply because they don't have added sugar?

We need a counter campaign.

Lorraine Kelly just asked Glynis Barbour who was promoting her play about cutting out sugar

Maybe she's angling after a job on The One Show

I don't know if the beeb are hating sugar though Lorraine might be barking up the wrong tree

Everyone is hating sugar right now - it's the new bandwagon.

Eating a bit then going for a walk is more achievable for me than religious abstinence.

I don't object to cutting down on sweet and sugary foods but suggestions that foods with lots of sweetners and other additives are a good alternative are quite wrong. I didn't last long on SW. All this well you can eat this disgusting mash and pretend it's something else. Worst ever was Ferrero Rocher made of albran and cocoa powder.

"Why don't they just run adverts to say cut out the processed crap and learn to cook?"

Pretty much this.

Although to be honest, I think the vast majority of overweight is caused by stressed out mindlessness as people grab convenience foods to just survive a ridiculously time-poor life. Mentally time-poor, more than anything.. where you literally feel so incredibly stressed/rushed all day that a bit of time cooking seems a push too far, or alternatively where your stress is such that buttering a slice of toast seems too much.

I put on weight when I was stressed not because I comfort-ate sugar rich food but because I frequently forgot I even had a body and went for hours and hours with nothing and then would eat the first piece of sugary crap I could lay my hands on. I didn't even like the stuff, I was just so overwhelmed with work and my thoughts about work that I was completely out of kilter with what I was putting into my body.

All a diet program like this would have done would be reinforce the habit of reaching for convenience foods instead of making time and/or mental space to actually eat something I wanted that was a bit better for me.

YY to children responding badly to aspartame. I buy Ribena and occasionally pop for a treat (lemonade or orange pop) and we have sweets on a Friday evening. I won't buy anything with artificial sweetener.
(DS is slim and we both have all our own teeth )
I really agree with what Hurricane says about sports clubs too. We need affordable sports facilities for kids of all ages. There are a couple of football, cricket and rugby clubs in my area, but they are expensive, and demand expensive kit.
Half the leisure centres have been shut down, and the local community centre, which used to house a youth club, got knocked down, and the land sold to developers. The centre took up a corner of a well used green where children could play out. The new houses being built have taken up most of this space.
If the government want to tackle obesity, they need to invest in facilities for kids, and stopping the sell off of our public green spaces, not spend our tax money pushing chemical enhanced rubbish.

activated = soaked

oops wrong thread :)

DD starts school in September. I've got all this bullshit to look forward to, haven't I?

cardamon don't stress too much :) I am a fan of school dinners overall. They have def improved the diet of my fussy eater and they do get offered lots of fruit too.

DD1 (7) told me yesterday she only goes for the pudding offered about twice a week, and otherwise has fruit (she loves the melon on offer) and she doesn't like the (artificially sweetened) yoghurt so yay for that.

I did get enraged yesterday when DD2 (nursery) and I were subject to an hour long "public health message" by Dept for Health (via the nursery) where we were told "fruit is good" "vegetables are good" "Sweets are bad" and other gems, before we played some games together, the most fun one was pretending to throw sweets at each other. FFS! Needless to say I am declining the rest of the 12 week course, as I suspect most other parents will.

What I find so enraging that they are TRYING to improve things, and spending money on it, but they way they are going about it is so misguided, ignorant and wrong.

It is the latest fad. This time next month we will have another celebrity telling us how to eat/not eat/lose weight/exercise/live.

It is this years glutten free imo I know there is loads of hidden sugar in stuff and things but to go completely sugar free is impossible stressful and a bit dull

someone wisely said the campaign should be 'stop buying crap and learn to cook'.

the teacake thing gives me the rage too. Completely the wrong approach.

also gnashing at the programme the other night on 'the world's best diets'. The English family they found had a table full of coloured boxes. Parents both grossly overweight, two out of the three kids also fat. Education going really wrong somewhere, or being ignored.

Not just you, DD2 and I were discussing it last night, sugar free crap gives me The Rage big time. They should be pushing a healthy, non-processed diet, and teaching about food groups, not replacing crap with more crap.

Why not advise water, milk, or watered down fruit juices? Eat a banana ffs, not a processed item full of muck.