I know you’re just trying to be nice. I know you’re just trying to be neighborly.
But please keep the candy to yourself. Don’t put me in the position of saying no to my kids after they’ve displayed good manners at the hair place or the bank. Tell them “thank you,” or “great job,” or give them a high-five.
They don’t need more candy.
Have you seen this? Are you aware of this? Are you trying to raise your kids on healthy foods?
Well, good luck with that.
Unless you live in some ultra-liberal, high-dollar, Santa-Something town in Northern California where town ordinances have outlawed Ho-Hos and require four hours of daily hot yoga, your well-meaning plan is doomed. You haven’t a chance.
I don’t mean to be a cynic, but I know this from experience. Three years ago, my wife, Holly, and I made a deliberate and very scary decision to change our lifestyle by introducing regular exercise and cutting out processed foods, sugar, and for the most part, grains. One of the big motivators was the future health and well-being of our three children, all under 10 at the time. Not only did we want to set a positive example for them, but we wanted to get them into the habit of making healthy dietary choices.
Problem is, try as we might, we can’t keep our children inside our home 24/7, and in case you haven’t noticed, America has lost its ever-loving mind when it comes to food.
There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens the moment you purchase a certain kind of vehicle or have a baby. Instantly, it seems, everybody drives that exact kind of car and everybody is having babies. Just the opposite occurs when you decide to become a healthy eater. Suddenly, the world is chock-full of terrible, sugary, processed foods. And at every turn, the world is trying to feed these foods to your children.
Problem is, it’s not just that it seems this way. It is this way. Suddenly, the veil is lifted, and you can see our country as it really is — fat and sick.
The indoctrination begins innocently enough in daycare. As a reward and/or bribe for practically any good behavior, our children are fed candy. As soon as a baby can safely consume processed sugar, America is shoving it down his or her throat. At church, she is rewarded for good behavior with a Tootsie Roll. At the fall harvest festival, each child’s hand is shoved full of candy as they exit the bouncy ride. Smarties, Skittles, Dots, Everlasting Gobstoppers, and Nerds. Jolly Ranchers, Pixy Stix, Mike & Ikes, Sweet Tarts, and Raisinettes.
In kindergarten, where soft drinks and fruit punches are served as a matter of course during any and every party, the featured “dish” is almost always cupcakes. (Water or milk is usually not an option.) Each semester is a virtual daily parade of birthday parties. Cupcakes, punch, Sprite, cupcakes, punch, Sprite.
And we’re not even out of kindergarten yet.
Elementary school field trips are awash in white-bread sandwiches and Hi-C. For breakfast, the preferred fare are S’mores Pop-Tarts.
Halloween, Christmas, and Easter have institutionalized sweets to the point that a parent is considered rude, crazy, abusive, or all of the above if they choose not to offer up their child for the sugar orgy. This year at Halloween (which I enjoy immensely in every other way), I paid $40 for the privilege of giving gobs of high-fructose corn syrup and sugar away to my neighbors’ children.
Yay, me.
As a culture, we have set up sweets to be the thing a child should strive for despite the annoying roadblock of healthy stuff. Soldier through the choking down of the green vegetables, lean meats, and other whole foods — the only offering with any nutritional value, mind you — so that you can arrive at the reward, the summit, the Ultimate Goal — dessert. Are we surprised that when a child is given the opportunity to skip the roadblock and go straight to the finish line, they don’t even hesitate?
How can foods that arrive at our homes in plain plastic sacks and have names like “broccoli,” “spinach,” or “cauliflower” ever hope to compete with zippy, shrink-wrapped, kaleidoscopic delights with monikers like “Pringles,” “Rolos,” “Now And Laters,” “Cheetos,” “Laffy Taffy,” or “Reese’s Pieces?”
Our country has become the most obese on the planet. More than one-third of adults in the U.S. are considered obese. Cancer, diabetes, and heart disease are as commonplace as the common cold, which, incidentally, is more common than ever. We are literally and collectively eating ourselves into early, miserable, pathetic, fat graves.
And we don’t really seem to care. More often than not, we have resigned to sugar ourselves into oblivion, and in many cases, we’re downright proud of it. This is what my mother and her mother and her mother cooked and ate, so by golly, it’s good enough for me! I’m proud of this fat! I’ve been working on it for years! We’ve all got to die somehow!
America is fat, and America is free, so have at it. Fill your cells and arteries with syrup and sludge, but keep my kids out of it. I know you’re just trying to be nice, and I appreciate that but don’t offer them suckers and ice cream and soda and cake and Smarties and candy bars. They’re not old enough to know better.
You are.
Click here for Part II of this post entitled, “Sugar pushes buttons.”
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Originally published on Doofus Dad
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