Stop abusing your kids with sugar. Learn to say “No”

Sugar is stealing children’s joy. Kids are wired by it and damaged by it. It is well past time that parents take responsibility, toughen up, and remember how to say “No”.

The spring school holidays have brought bodies out from under the clothing covers of winter and into the sunlight.

A cursory perusal of beaches and parks will show that the kids are not OK. Too many are in lousy shape. Too many young bodies, which are primed for health and movement, are soft, fat and unhealthy.

And sweet stuff, administered or allowed by parents, is largely to blame.

There is no doubt most parents love their offspring. So why are they making them unhealthy by feeding them sweet poison?

And why is it considered odd or extreme to tightly control what goes in a child’s mouth and teach the little tacker that real flavour exists in plain, real, nature-given food?

Before the social police sharpen their knives, I am not suggesting parents tell their kids they are fat, or lambaste them for their softness.

They just need to stop killing them with sweet treats and junior’s health will return like a long-lost brother. Kids are fiercely physically resilient.

Lunch boxes loaded with museli bars, cakes by many names, and so-called fruit straps; allowing sweet drinks when water should be a standard — it is as if sugar has become a sign of love and parents are lavishing them with it.

Many kids are in lousy shape. Stop feeding them sugar. (Pic: Getty Images)

But it is stealing their joy. They are wearing it, are wired by it, and are damaged by it. It is well past time that parents take responsibility, toughen up, and remember how to say no.

Our littlest children are being increasingly diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, for Pete’s sake — a preventable lifestyle disease. Heads should be collectively hanging in shame for allowing this to happen.

The problem has been that sugar is so easily accessible, so affordable, and so acceptable. Changing these three was the key to weaning our society off another foe that was killing us — cigarettes — and the time is past to switch the focus to sugar.

Tax it, using that tariff to subsidise real food and return us to a time when water and vegetables were cheaper than soft drink and chips.

Sugar is a duplicitous master, tempting sweetly and then leaving a person wrecked and ruined. It has been allowed to be incorporated in almost everything in a can, box or a packet without our consent and has wooed our tastebuds into thinking it is part of the culinary landscape. It is hidden in plain sight.

Children get all the sugar they need from fruit, vegetables, and milk, and their little bodies are built to turn carbohydrates into usable sugar as efficiently as the wildest Willy Wonka contraption.

Say ”no’, parents. Just say “no”. (Pic: iStock)

The American Heart Association last year said children should get only three teaspoons of added sugar in their daily diet. To put that in context, a single can of soft drink contains about 12 teaspoons. And so-called healthy foods are often loaded with sugar: a fruit flavoured yoghurt tub or serve of baked beans has about five teaspoons and a muesli bar six or seven.

There is talk about moderation, but we are not a moderate nation.

The average Australian has 27 teaspoons of added sugar every day, far more than the nation we like to point to as fatty boombahs, America, and more than those in Britain, which bravely announced this year it would introduce a tax on sugary drinks.

Half of the kids in Australia consume a sugar-sweetened drink every day. And Australians were the highest consumers of unsweetened fruit juice in the world, presumably because we think it is healthy.

But if you can’t eat six oranges in a sitting, you should not drink a glass of juice either — freshly squeezed or not. Nature’s fibre buffer is removed and it has the effect of turning the sugar into shots. And parents are funnelling that into their children.

So here is a tip: make soft drink, ice cream and lollies non-existent or incredibly rare, even on holidays. They are health and behavioural dynamite.

Cut out the sweet stuff today, and it’s guaranteed the school holiday loopiness that has set in by now will all but disappear and teachers’ jobs will be markedly easier by next Tuesday when school starts.

It is simple: say “no”.

Don’t let them have the stuff. The concerning information about sugar is so prevalent parents can no longer say they did not know.

To let kids loose on sugar has become tantamount to child abuse.

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