Back to basics – don’t eat between meals

There are a few words in the English language that make me shiver with distaste when I hear them, as if I’m listening to someone’s nails screeching down a blackboard. “Moist” is one of them. “Wedge” is another. “Nibbles” is pretty bad. “Snacks” is also up there.

Anyway, snacks are in the news, so I can’t avoid them. Officials at Public Health England have told parents that children should only be allowed two snacks of 100 or fewer calories a day, in a bid to tackle spiralling obesity rates. They’re urging us to clamp down on “a grazing culture”, which makes us all sound a bit like cows, though hopefully with fewer methane emissions and less call for milking parlours.

Apparently the average child eats at least three snacks a day, which amounts to almost 400 biscuits, 120 cakes, 100 portions of sweets and nearly 70 chocolate bars and ice creams a year. We are, it seems, breeding a nation of Augustus Gloops: a third of children are overweight or

obese by the time they leave primary school.

It seems to me fairly obvious that a good way of tackling children eating too much food and therefore getting fat is to give them less food and therefore make them less fat, but it’s good of Public Health England to spend their time telling us this.

When I was a child, many millennia ago, it was a hard-and-fast rule that there was no snacking between meals. Let’s just reinstate that eminently sensible principle and be done with it.