Sweets - do you allow them? Interesting article in Guardian weekend mag

[edam]

Sense of guilty recognition when I read this - suddenly realised that I do feel smug about feeding ds raisins instead of sweets. Then again, he's only two - maybe it will be different as he gets older?
Unfortunately can't make link work but this is the URL:

www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1542389,00.html

Have always loved sweets, but did have them strictly rationed to 5 sweets after dinner each day. Always had a very sweet tooth (still have 3 sugars in my unsullied-by-milk tea) - am thin and have no fillings. You can all hit me now

No sweets in our house...what's the point of them ?

Full of horrible artifical colours, 'bovine' gelatine & goodness knows what. YUK!

Having said that DD did have milk buttons on her b'day in pass the parcel & organic white buttons on the visits to the cranial oesteopath.

I do make cakes & she does have ice lollies made out of fruit smoothies, so I don't think she is deprived.

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Don't allow my two to have any sweets - dd loves food and eats anything, and her idea of a yummy snack is an apple (not meaning to sound smug because...) ds is really really fussy, and he would happily fill up on sweets and forgo his meals. And he goes hyper when he has sugar. For hours.

Fundamentally disagreed with some of the article - when he says that bread will rot your teeth in the same way as sweets - ok, bread has sugar in it, but you tend not to put a bread bun on a stick and suck it for hours, which I believe is the biggest problem, having the sugar in contact with your teeth for hours. Also the sweets contain all the E numbers that bread does not!

Also, wouldn't you be really worried if your child ate 'Daddy's pills'?

I also think the following extract is just b*llocks.

Sweets may not bring much in the way of vitamins, but their psychological benefit is unquestionable. A sweet can transform a miserable afternoon, it can break the ice at social occasions, and at the end of a difficult day you can look back and see how a sweetie just tipped the balance and made it into an OK day rather than a truly bad one.

tortoiseshell you've clearly experienced a sweet as doing the opposite!

I agree about the Es and stuff, but doesn't he say in the article what you're saying about how fast you eat the sweets? He mentions eating them quickly instead of sucking for hours or eating them throughout the day or something.

I loved that bit, tortoiseshell... I thought it was unquestionably true! I definitely remember that feeling as a kid when I bought a quarter of kola kubes or lemon sherbets. Or a large packet of mint poppets to share with my sister at the cinema. I still feel it now if I come across a shop selling Sherbet Fountains- I always buy one and eat it with unalloyed pleasure. It's up there with oysters, gorgonzola and olive oil marinaded artichoke hearts as a top treat yet is about a million times cheaper than any of them! I know my boys feel the same way about sour rip rolls, fruit pastilles jelly beans and haribo. Their pleasure at sweets is intense and that makes me happy! Thanks Edam- really enjoyed this article.

P.S. Just asked my boys and they say raisins are not as good as sweets because:

1. they're fruit and so way healthier than sweets

2. they don't have proper sugar in them

3. they're all wrinkly like old men and women

I actually think that children need the calories from sweet foods to give them sufficient energy for all the endless running and jumping around they do.

I'm very much an 'all things in moderation' person (except when it comes to wine - for me). I think the odd sweet as part of a healthy diet is good for them.

I am worried that some people seem to be very controlling over what their children eat - how are they going to learn how to self-control if they don't get the opportunity to make choices for themselves as young children? Will they go mad in the sweety shop as soon as they have money to spend and the opportunity to spend it???

Mine are tall and skinny BTW - eat like horses at mealtimes too!!

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a friends nephew was brought up on a macrobiotic diet, not quite sure what it entails. But when he was 9 his mother was cleaning his room and found a huge stash (100+) of sweets choclolates etc.
My dh used to teach in a school where all the kids ate lots of sweets and they had a pretty laid back attitude to them (and incredibly bad teeth, even the visiting school dentist was shocked). He now works in a very middle class/upper middle class school and when someone occasionally bring in sweets they go crazy and are almost fighting each other for more.

Its funny though what some parents allow and don't allow. This very smug mother of a 2 yr old the other day was saying her son had never had a biscuit. But she was letting him much his way throguh a packet of crisp (they were organix they are hardly that healthy). I also used to know a girl who wasn't allowed biscuits at a todlerr group I ran but at the end of year party she was drinking capri-sun! And a friend who gave her son runny eggs very early on and dairy before 6 motnhs was shocked I gave my son shellfish.(the fsa say is ok at 6 months). Someone was recently suprised I let my son have crisps (hes 2 and its about 2 packets a month) but not a lolly. I was frightened of him choking on it!

Sorry to ramble, am at work and bored.

Lizita- you can really tell Gillian McKeith doesn't eat sweets though, can't you? She's such a shrivelled crabbit whinger, I always think. Bit like a raisin really!

scummymummy. I think she is a bit extreme but she does make some sense sometimes. I guess she's good for the extreme people she has to deal with.

I can't stand her and she looks sooo bad for her age. I thought she was late fiftes not early forties.

Gillian McKeith is a fraud - I take anything she writes with a very huge pinch of salt.

I think the overall point though, is that sometimes we can get a bit too wrapped up in always eating/doing exactly the right thing. Sometimes food is about a healthy balance/getting the right fuel, sometimes it's about pure pleasure and enjoyment, sometimes the two coincide - sometimes they are diametrically opposite.

On the whole, I'd like to think that there's room in this world for both without foreshortening one's life too much

And surely bad diet /over-reliance on processed foods (which is more a cause of the obesity/bad health problems) is because we've lost that enjoyment of food and we're too keen on convenience/cheap price to the detriment of flavour and freshness? So surely getting back to a philosophy of enjoying a wide range of foods (whether sweets, fresh veg, gormet cheeses...) without too much unnecessary guilt and hangups is the key?

Gillian McKeith is dangerous! She is NOT qualified to dispense dietetic advise at all. Unless you have a medical condition, colonics are ENTIRELY unnecessary and could be dangerous. The colon, like the vagina, is a self-cleansing organ.

Agree absolutely Georgina. Wanting to be perfect in any way - as a parent, eating well, etc - just stresses you out! I think I eat pretty healthily, with a healthy attitude to "naughty" foods too but according to You Are What You Eat I am in grave danger! I think it's good to know what the extremes are though so you can moderate it and do something in between!
But Gillian McKeith obviously made a huge difference to the people's lives that she worked with on the telly.

why is Gillian Mckeith a fruad & dangerous ? Seeing the people on her shows, they look dangerous & if they carried on with their old lifestyles, they're eating their way to an earlier grave.

My friends hubby is seriously overweight & he refuses to watch her because he is afraid of the truth - being overweight & eating crap is unheathly.

Also what's wrong with colonics ? have you had one ?

Also if you're children grow up & want to raid the sweetshop, so what, it'll be their choice but at the moment I don't think they are qualified to make a wise judgement on what they eat. I didn't eat sweets & I'm not interested in them now, same with DH, he'd rather tuck into a plate of saute potatoes !

I haven't read the article or responses but as an exercise in honesty I am going to think on the spot about what DS really eats:

most days a biscuit, if not two
most days dried fruit/yoghurt
Fridays sweets with his DVD (small bag of Jellytots or similar) (we have movie night for him if he is good in the week)
Weekends we often have cakes or he bakes something with me/DH and eats the work in progress/finished product.

I worry more about the amount of peanut butter sandwiches my child eats - he is borderline obsessive

I can see that DS gets far more treats than I ever did as a child but I do try to balance it by making sure he eats a good meal with us in the evenings and that snacks are for the most part healthy.

The kids have sweet day on Saturdays. We'll occasionally give sweets on other days, but that makes them real treats. They seem happy with it and so are we.

Reasons Gillian McKeith is a fraud (all from the Guardian's Bad Science column):

"However the prize went, in a surprising result, to Dr Gillian McKeith PhD. It would take an entire page to unpick, in appropriate detail, the complex web of this litigious candidate's unusual CV. For those who are interested, she has now been the subject of six Bad Science columns, debunkings in several national newspapers, and a half-hour ITV documentary on Monday, which cheerfully borrowed all of my jokes, research, and ideas, although I'm not bitter. Suffice to say, regardless of the boring details, anyone who claims that eating chlorophyll will really "oxygenate your blood", and that a seed contains "all of the energy necessary to make a fully grown plant", cannot possibly have a meaningful postgraduate qualification in a biological field. She received a small specimen jar containing the faeces of the judging panel, which will be duly forwarded to her agent if she is willing to submit it for testing."

what the letters AANC really mean

more debunking of her nonsense

Honestly, the woman is dangerous. If she was a real medical doctor, she would have been struck off by now...

Not Guardian, but a page exploring her "qualifications"

I can't post rationally on subjects like this, I start using the term food fascist and riling everyone

It always seems pretty obvious to me what we need to do to eat healthily, can't really understand why we need people like Gillian McKeith to tell us. Actually following it through is another matter!

Moderation is my motto.

I loved sweets as a child. I adored chocolate limes and anniseed balls, anything with sherbet, spangles and pacers. I didn't eat them as a pre schooler though they were definately a pocket money thing when I could go to the shop on my own. I don't think my parents ever bought me sweets and I don't buy them for ds.

Yum, i must say i agree with the sentiment of that article!
Sherbert lemons, chocolate limes, flying saucers (that is those sugar paper things filled with sherbert isn't it?), bootlaces,......can't think of any others.