• They are sweet:
Although saltiness is the first flavour that hits you when you eat crisps, all but the most basic salted crisps contain sugar or artificial sweeteners to give flavour. Children eat too much of the former anyway and there are health concerns over the safety of the latter (see pages 6–7).
• They often contain undesirable additives:
Many extruded snacks contain monosodium glutamate, for example, a chemical flavour enhancer that has been widely linked to allergic reactions in sensitive people. Acidity regulators are routinely used to balance the other chemical flavourings in crisps. Additives such as these have no benefits for health whatsoever and increase the total intake of unnecessary chemicals that children eat – an intake that many health experts would like to see reduced.
• They usually contain chemical flavourings:
These totally synthetic flavourings are presumed safe on very thin scientific grounds because there is, as yet, no evidence that they cause harm. However, the long-term toxicological effects on modern children – who may nowadays get a surprisingly large cocktail of them – have not been studied.
• They may contain chemical or natural colour. These can cause allergic and other reactions in some people.
To sum up the nutritional contents of all those bag snacks, they represent a large dose of everything you don’t want children to eat and a very small amount of anything you might want them to eat. The nutritional goodness of any reasonably wholesome ingredient – such as potatoes, corn or wheat – is totally dwarfed by fat, salt, sweet flavourings and undesirable industrial additives.
But as well as being nutritionally unbalanced, the larger-than-life, mouth-mugging qualities of crisps and extruded snacks have a pernicious effect on young tastebuds, accustoming them to hefty servings of that all-too-familiar fat/salt/sugar trilogy so omnipresent in junk food. A taste for this will certainly distort the palate and reduce a child’s ability to appreciate real, natural food that lacks these heavy-handed artificial tastes. Just as we would find it unpleasant to drink orange juice after brushing our teeth, so children accustomed to the taste effect of crisps and other junk food will find it harder to like or appreciate a wider range of more subtle, straightforward, untampered-with flavours.
Despite the poor nutrition they offer, and the junk-food palate they are likely to encourage, crisps and extruded snacks have become the ubiquitous ‘savoury’ convenience foods for children. They are cheap, though not necessarily good value for money, and they keep for ages. Pre-wrapped and easily opened, they are the lazy alternative to a more wholesome snack that might need to be prepared at home. When we are tired or under pressure, it’s very easy just to pop that bag of crisps into the schoolbag rather than filling a roll or even washing an apple.
However, if we want our children to grow up to be adults who like wholesome, natural food and appreciate a wide range of flavours, crisps and extruded snacks are one significant category in the modern ‘children’s diet’ they are much better off without. An occasional bag of crisps is not a cause for concern. But if children are eating them every day, sometimes twice a day, and eating them in preference to good food, then they can become a problem.
That is why it is best to strike these bag snacks off your routine shopping list and turn instead to Twenty-five Good Snacks (pages 237–8), which lists alternatives that appeal to many children. For alternative packed lunch ideas, see Ten Good Packed Lunches (pages 259–62)
We are tired, the children are crotchety and we need to get on with some essential tasks, so we switch on the television to give us some breathing space. But as we buy ourselves some peace and relative quiet we may, without knowing it, be storing up problems when it comes to getting our children to eat a decent, wholesome diet.
We may begin to find that, even from the youngest age, when we try to give them water the children start demanding a sweetened fizzy drink. No matter how tempting the contents of our fruit bowl, we may see them gravitating towards the biscuit tin or demanding money to visit the sweet shop. We find ourselves wondering why they won’t eat anything made with fish, unless it’s coated in crispy crumb or formed into a special marine ‘shape’. When we buy the more traditional, unsticky breakfast cereals, we find them campaigning for the latest brand that’s stuck together with sugar and other sweet ingredients. Where do these demands come from?
Before you subscribe to the prevalent attitude that all children just naturally and spontaneously want to eat junk, consider first the pressure that emanates from that flickering screen. We need look no further than the diet of food ads served up on children’s prime-time television, which consists of little more than what some researchers call ‘an onslaught of junk-food hype’.
In 1996 the independent watchdog, Consumers International, surveyed the type of food advertising during peak children’s television hours in thirteen countries: eleven in Europe plus the USA and Australia. In the UK it found that children see seventeen adverts each hour and ten of these are for food or drink – the highest number of food and drink ads in any European country.
A massive 95 per cent of these ads were for unhealthy foods, high in fat, sugar or salt. Top of the food ad pops in the UK came confectionery, with breakfast cereals following a close second. By comparison, ads for foods that most people would agree should be encouraged, such as fruit and vegetables, were almost non-existent. The only remotely healthy ads that British children are likely to see on television are for frozen peas.
Consumers International’s survey confirms the findings of another carried out in 1995 by the National Food Alliance. This also concluded that advertising during programmes appealing to children presented a grossly unbalanced nutritional message with fatty and sugary foods predominating.
This imbalance matters particularly because children are less able than adults to understand the intent of advertising or its persuasive techniques and are therefore less able to treat it with scepticism. The younger the child, the more vulnerable she or he is to swallowing an advertising message uncritically. A 1996 UK government report reiterated what other researchers have found – that children have difficulty distinguishing television advertisements from the programmes surrounding them. At the most television-dependent age of three to four, when it is a boon to plonk down your offspring in front of the television while you get on with other things, it is unlikely that they can differentiate between the two. It is now thought that it is only after the age of ten to twelve that children realise that the purpose of advertisements is to persuade you to buy things. This confusion is compounded by the use of characters or personalities popular with children which appear to endorse the product in the child’s eyes. Whether it’s cuddly, collectable free gifts with characters from the latest cartoon blockbuster or a cute little familiar face on that pot of fromage frais, such images exploit children’s gullibility.
Obviously advertising isn’t the only message that influences what children eat. The advertising industry says that its critics ignore the role of families and education in helping children make healthy choices. When that familiar ‘Can we buy that?’ plea follows the ad, the advertising industry expects us to take the time to explain patiently to our children how that sticky cereal or fatty snack isn’t very healthy unless it’s part of a ‘balanced diet’. And surely public health campaigns and education at school should be pointing the nation’s youth along the right path too?
But there is a lot of research to suggest that television advertising is the single most important factor influencing what children eat. In the US researchers have found that even when allowing for factors such as sex, reading level, ethnic background, parents’ occupation and educational level, television viewing correlated with bad eating habits and faulty understanding of the principles of nutrition.
In Sweden and Norway the pressure has been taken off parents because no advertisements at all are allowed during children’s programmes. In Denmark and Finland