How can we fight the evil of chocolate? Er... say no!
IT’S all the fault of the chocolate retailers, obviously. If only they weren’t so clever about marketing their sugary, fattening, fatty, and irresistibly delicious products, we’d all be skinny as rakes. If only they didn’t start pushing their Easter eggs at us just as soon as the last of the Christmas selection boxes disappear from the shelves, we’d all be paragons of prudence.
And then there’s the St Valentine’s Day chocolates, the summer ice-cream promotions, and let’s not forget Halloween.
There was a time when Halloween was all about snap apple, monkey nuts and colcannon made with kale – a nutritionist’s fantasy diet, in other words. Now it’s about the big sweet companies plugging their ‘trick or treat’ jellies, chocolates, skull-shaped cookies and lollies the size of pumpkins. And just when you’ve managed to peel your buzzing, hyper, sugar-addled kids down from the ceiling after that choc-fest, along comes Christmas and giant tubs of chocolate assortments and tins of biscuits, and that curiosity which only ever makes an appearance at Christmas, the selection box. No wonder so many of our children are obese.
And if the sweet companies weren’t bad enough on their own, they’ve also got an army of willing accomplices in grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbours and friends. They’re basically the ‘pushers’ for the chocolate manufacturers, bringing this stuff into the homes of helpless parents and forcing it on their children under their very noses. ‘The super-sized eggs were on special offer,’ they’ll say, ‘and sure really, they’re mostly packaging’, or, ‘The selection boxes were two for a fiver, I couldn’t leave them behind me’, or, ‘It’s just a teeny-weeny little life-sized chocolate bunny, and Easter only comes once a year, go on, go on, go on…’
This week, the State’s healthy eating watchdog, Safefood Ireland, called out the villains of childhood obesity, just in time for the weekend that’s in it. It’s all the fault of the chocolate manufacturers, who make chocolate and then shamelessly try to sell it. And they’re aided and abetted by the grannies and relatives who buy their gear, meaning that many children will get several eggs apiece tomorrow. A large chocolate egg can have 40 teaspoons of sugar, and a medium one has 23 spoons, which sets a child straight on the road for Diabetes Central. So the most that any child should have this weekend is a single medium-sized egg. An Irish Heart Foundation spokeswoman suggested that, as alternative Easter gifts, the grannies might consider Easter mugs, slippers, colouring books, bunny pyjamas, or a ‘grow your own egg-themed cress plant’.
Well, here’s another alternative. Parents might try actually parenting. Instead of wringing our hands and lamenting the manipulations of the Easter egg makers, or the well-intentioned ‘egg-cesses’ (sorry!) of kindly relatives, parents might try the entirely novel approach of saying, ‘No’. As in, ‘No, you can’t eat all 20 of your eggs today’. Or even ‘No, you can just have one since it’s Easter Sunday, but we’ll put the rest away for some other time’. Or, ‘No, pick your favourite and we’ll donate the rest to the nearest homeless shelter/women’s refuge/charity shop’. Or call to a lonely elderly neighbour, and re-gift an egg. Or give one to the bin-men, working on Bank Holiday Monday, or hand one to the bus driver, or somebody such as the parish priest, who might not have anyone to buy him a chocolate egg.
OR, if all that sweet worthiness is already giving you prediabetic pangs, then how about just, ‘No’? As in, ‘No, because I care about your health, your teeth and your weight, and that’s why I am not letting you eat your body weight in milk chocolate’. The task of parenting our children, it seems to me, is one we are all too quick to subcontract out.
We blame the tech companies for getting our children addicted to smartphones, when we know the dangers and we still buy them the damned things. We blame the schools for not letting
them run in the playgrounds, when we wouldn’t dream of getting off the sofa at weekends and taking them for a long walk. And we blame the fast-food outlets, the ready-meals manufacturers, the chocolate companies and the supermarkets that sell cheap eggs, when we just can’t be bothered to say ‘no’.
Parents have no end of excuses for their children’s obesity, and no end of people willingly supplying them with a scapegoat – fast food is so handy/chocolate is so cheap/fruit is so expensive – when they really need some tough talk. Safefood and the Irish Heart Foundation are right to warn of the dangers, but they have to say that, ultimately, this is a parenting issue. If your children eat 20 Easter eggs, each containing 40 teaspoons of sugar, this weekend, that is nobody’s fault but your own.