You need to tackle this stuff early on. Here in Norway sweets are banned from pre-school and school in lunch boxes, including for birth days. There are no pre-school or school celebrations involving sweets.
The kids get involved early in learning about healthy food making and we get a cook book about what sort of food one should make for children when they start school.
This is something so serious for people's future and life that I don't think one can focus enough on it.
Those toddlers' parents may not have received the greatest nutrition education. In the 1980s, ketchup was famously declared a vegetable (despite being mostly sugar). Anecdotally, as a child in the U.S. during that era, I remember being marked wrong on a nutrition worksheet where I identified milkshakes as a dessert. No, my teacher insisted. Milkshakes aren't dessert. They're dairy.
That's the thing about the food pyramid that was so bad, foods don't always neatly fit into one category, and foods sharing a category can have very different nutritional profiles.
No wonder so many Americans eat iceberg lettuce, and put added sugar in bread.
Well, even in the 80s, people were mocking the Reagan administration's classification of ketchup as a vegetable.
And for all the flaws of the food pyramid, I can remember a time before that when it was even worse. We had the "Basic Four" food groups: meat, dairy, fruit+vegetables, and grains.
Wait, what's wrong with iceberg lettuce? Seriously, as an American that eats like 1/2 head per day, am I rotting my teeth out? Am I headed for diabetes? You've got me scared.
It's nutritional profile is significantly less than an average vegetable. I advice switching iceberg lettuce for darker leafy greens. Assuming you eat the lettuce in salads this can be done without much discomfort by slowing introducing darker greens in your salad, and adding more as your body is accustom to them.
You aren't hurting yourself by eating lettuce, but it's a missed opportunity to do so much more for your diet. See the difference for yourself.
It's not bad of itself but it's nutritionally deficient. My ex raised herps lizards and turtles. Both die of malnutrition if fed too much iceberg lettuce.
Ketchup vegetable wasn't "education"; it was political football with school lunch funding and minimum vegetable requirements and trying to feed kids when they'd simply throw away any salad they were served.
I agree most comments here are confusing what's being taught in schools with what was a ridiculous "compromise" in school cafeterias.
But I'm sure the reason kids threw away fruits and vegetables because they were terrible; not necessarily because they were healthy. I don't know if it's a low value put on food or cost-cutting...I'm sure both are related. You can see this in places other than schools, outside of every corporate meeting is a tray of terrible honeydew and cantaloupe. Most lettuce and tomato don't really have flavor but seem to leach off-flavors. In my personal experience, when I find out someone says they don't like a certain food about half the time it's because they've never had a good example of it.
It's difficult because fresh food spoils so much more quickly than other, cheaper, and less healthy foods. But what's crazy is that today we have way better technology than most of human history to make even the foods most prone to spoilage cheaper an accessible...it's just relative to frozen pizza and ketchup it's more expensive.
Most food suppliers for schools are the same companies supplying food for prisons. With a captive consumer base I certainly wouldn't expect all that great of fruit and vegetables. Their only concerns are profit and passing minimum safety standards.
One thing I've noticed is that a huge percentage of the American population had been tricked into thinking that fruit juice is healthy.
It isn't healthy. It is soda with some vitamins tossed in as far as the body is concerned.
I fully blame the US government for this. Even liberal cities that pass soda tax laws ignore fruit juice, because hippies with a naturalistic fallacy are a powerful voting bloc on the Democratic party.
I would say that MOST toddlers I see drink several juices a day.
For my kids, it was always a treat, and served incredibly watered down, as in 1 part juice to 6 parts water. So sweet that they don't even know that.
We'd call that a shake in the US, but not a milkshake. My gut tells me there is a distinction. You can drink a "shake" after the gym, but a milkshake with a burger and fries.
Our milkshakes will have other additives such as malt, vanilla extract, and some sweetener.
We don't actually have school lunches. The only thing they got usually is that kids can eat vegetables for free. But that is really just for snacking, you need to bring your own lunch box. That is why there isn't that much nutritional standards for our schools, it is more about guides for parents.
Not only do we get the cookbook for parents, but we are also offered free lectures about nutrition and healthy eating for children. That is an offer all first time parents get. So you can go in the evening and listen to a nutritional expert talk about what sort of food is good for children.
I remember the nutritional expert that held a lecture for me was really cool. She said, that to her, there was no bad food. Instead it was about how much you ate of different kinds of foods. She wanted to emphasize the the problem for most people is that they eat the wrong quantities of different types of foods.
E.g. she mentioned how we eat too much red meat, but that we should not cut it out entirely because it contains many useful things such as iron. Eat red meat once or twice a week I think she said.
And this is the real kicker. Norway is a relatively affluent country with a comprehensive social safety net and a relatively homogenous culture.
Here in the US, we have too many children living in poverty, often with single parents and broken families, who would never bring their own lunchbox in the first place. School lunch is a necessity, otherwise a lot of kids would go hungry and not be able to learn anything.
Norway also doesn't have a huge domestic agriculture sector with outsized political power, and school lunch is a really nice subsidy for them as well.
The lunch boxes isn't really caused by our affluence however, rather it is caused by our traditional poverty. Most other European countries serve school lunches. The French have amazing school lunches. When on vacation in France we passed schools in town and every school had their menu posted at the entrance. They had fricken 3 course meals on every dam school! And it was pretty fancy stuff.
Norwegian food culture is in fact rather primitive. The only reason we are somewhat healthy is because we don't eat that much sweets and fried stuff, and we tend to eat primarily whole grain.
> Here in the US, we have too many children living in poverty, often with single parents and broken families, who would never bring their own lunchbox in the first place. School lunch is a necessity, otherwise a lot of kids would go hungry and not be able to learn anything.
I get that, but they might already struggle given what I've seen American school lunches look like. Also one need to teach parents how to cook healthy food. It doesn't help that they get something healthy in school if they just eat junk at home.
> Norway also doesn't have a huge domestic agriculture sector with outsized political power, and school lunch is a really nice subsidy for them as well.
Hahaha, then you don't know Norwegian politics ;-P We have a whole political party just for farmers. Farmers get more subsidies than anywhere else in the world I think here. They got very strong influence. This is tied to our history and identity. Farmers manage to project this idea they they are the sole of the nation and that food from any other country is scary and dangerous.
I would claim the issue in the US isn't your agricultural sector but the political clout of the food processors. Fast food chains, grocery store chains and makers of food products don't have that much influence in Norwegian politics. But they seem to have a lot of influence in American politics. Anyone with money seems to have.
Farmers in Norway don't have influence due to money but more from an emotional stand point. They appeal to basic emotions. We are a country which has historically suffered a lot of food shortages and so there is an ingrained belief that we need to be self sufficient. There is also an element of xenophobia. That foreign food is full of anti-biotics, hormons, e-coli, salmonella etc. Which is partially true but not as dangerous as people make it.
Growing up in Sweden, we definitely had school lunches. Bringing food from home was unheard of, school lunch was provided and everyone ate it (and complained about it.)
It wasn't until grade 11-12 or something that we sometimes started going out and getting burgers for lunch....
> Here in Norway sweets are banned from pre-school and school in lunch boxes
This seems reasonable.
I remember seeing 'Supersize me' where kids were fed with junk food (e.g. pizza, chocolate bars, sodas) at school. Is that representative of American schools or did they pick the worst ones to make their point?
It varies by location and affluence. When I was going to a public elementary school in the midwest, in the very early 1990s, we had "pizza days" that happened once or twice a month but generally the food was fairly healthy.
I think they maybe had deserts like pudding sometimes. There were no sodas or junk food available at all. The drink choices were 2% milk, chocolate milk, or water.
What I do remember is the food seemed fairly low quality. Canned and frozen packaged stuff, never anything resembling fresh. Every kid got the exact same meal unless you had some medical exemption.
In high school there were some bad choices available in the menu. There were soda and junk food vending machines, but they weren't part of the normal cafeteria and I never had money for them. While there were unhealthy options, there were also many healthy options and you simply bought what you wanted. The freshness was maybe a step up from elementary school.
I think there may have been efforts to remove the vending machines since my time there.
> In high school there were all sorts of bad choices. There were soda and junk food vending machines.
I read a bunch of years ago in Branded by Alissa Quart of American schools where soda giants would fund equipment for the sports teams and provide free soda for the cafeteria. So the school would both have to pay for their own drinks in the cafeteria and refuse sponsorship of the sports team to avoid being involved with soda the companies. It just makes economic sense in that case to let the soda company rope the kids in.
It's been a while since I read it, and I can't verify the truth. For me, it sounds like schools should have no part in getting kids addicted to soda.
That is just sad. I think it is for good reason here in Norway that companies can not contribute to school funding. They try to keep private money out of schools, so that you don't end up with A and B schools because some parents are richer than others.
I think the corporate sponsorship you talk about here also means that the pressure to fund schools properly through taxes are taken away. It gets too easy to avoid taxes by getting others to pay.
> That is just sad. I think it is for good reason here in Norway that companies can not contribute to school funding.
I had a great High School class in genetics that would not have been possible without large donations of money and equipment from a local biotech company.
I have fewer problems with companies donating science equipment, computers, and the like. There have been occasional issues with corporate donated history books though...
I can see that happening. Hopefully it's less of a possibility now than it would have been when I was attending in the late 1990s.
I think at my school it was because staff wanted them, so why not have them available for the kids too? I don't think much thought was given to it, and even if there were it would have been framed as a matter of personal responsibility. Adults there would have not thought of their responsibility to teach children good eating habits -- that was for the parents.
Back when I was in middle school (mid-90's), I was on the student council, which was responsible for maintaining relationships with the junk food vendors (we used it to raise money for other projects). We switched from Coke to Pepsi during that time, and I remember them coming to us with a deal that involved them providing the vending machines, running some contests, and some other goodies for the school. All we had to do was give them exclusive access.
What a terrible menu. It has 'cultural poverty' written all over it. Food is a major manifestation of culture--food speaks volumes about the people who prepare and eat it.
What ends up happening is that the Feds fund school lunch at a level where you cannot say no as a district, but the hooks that come with the money make it difficult to do a better job.
At my highschool, pizza, hamburgers, and fries were regularly available options. Soda was available from vending machines. Milk was the standard beverage included with lunches, which included the option of either white milk, or sugary chocolate milk.
Exact same here. Greasy rectangles they called pizza, nachos, chocolate milk, soda, fries were all regular if not daily meals. What do you expect from 300lb adults who think their weight is the norm.
That's the bad part. Simple carbs from bread have high glycemic index and easily convert to body fat. Modern diets are composed of way too high amounts of carbs.
"I hate that" people think calories and weight is the primary gauge of health.
It's true weight is very often a negative health indicator because of the toxic nature of the diet that results in weight gain. However, losing weight is not always a sign of being more healthy.
Shutting down your liver, clogging your arteries, and generally filling your soft tissue and fat storage with toxins is not healthy even if you appear to be losing weight.
While true, I think this sentiment is vastly overstated. For the typical American eating the typical American diet, obesity is one of the biggest risks. It's right up there with smoking, except smoking is getting less popular and obesity is getting more popular.
Let's clear one thing up first: aside from a few issues like joint stress, it's not weight in general that's the problem; it's body fat. If you're a power athlete with significant muscle mass, you're going to be able to carry a lot of weight and still be perfectly healthy as long as it's lean weight. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson shouldn't worry about his weight, despite having a BMI that's technically in the obese category. If you have a high weight for your height and you don't look like a professional wrestler, you should definitely be concerned about your weight.
Aside from the problems caused directly by excess body fat, carrying around excess body fat also makes it far more difficult and far riskier to exercise, which means all your other health indicators are going to go down south. Even mental health is pretty strongly influenced by exercise. Also, excess body fat is a far more difficult problem to solve.
I would say this is putting the cart before the horse. It's not excess body fat that is the source of health problems. It's the lifestyle (diet and movement) that leads to excess body fat (as one of the many symptoms of growing health problems) from choices.
In other words, baldness, obesity, sluggishness, headaches, etc... are not the source of health problems - they are the symptoms.
The Rock should absolutely be worried about his health, specifically his endocrine system as it is physiologically supranormal because of the cocktail of drugs he is undoubtedly on.
The doctor who does my physicals commented that he considers weight to be maybe the fourth or fifth thing he looks at when considering your basic health. Being overweight is bad, but because it's so overemphasized (and so easy to see), people ignore some things that should go in front of it.
(Though one imagines that if one is not willing to change one's diet or exercise habits to lose weight, the odds of them willing to do it to lower blood pressure or other such indicators seems low too.)
The McDouble/hamburger diet is a legitimate diet. You can dial in exactly how many calories you're eating.
To prove a point a few years back, I ate nothing but pizza and diet Pepsi for several weeks and lost weight. 2 supermarket pizzas was something like 1800 calories.
As someone who would like to lose about 50lbs I have a lot of questions. Mostly I'd like to know how you determined your resting metabolic rate. I've started working out a little and adjusted my diet a lot but I kinda feel like I'm fumbling around in the dark.
I lost about 60 lbs on Phentermine, then gained 10 lbs back, then lost about 15 lbs just dieting, and then gained about 10 lbs back.
Phentermine made it a lot easier because I didn't feel hungry, even when I was. But other than that, the same techniques applied: I used a calorie counter and tried to stick to the recommendation that it gave.
After using it a month or 2, I realized that its numbers were slightly high for me, and cut my max allowed calories a little further and started losing weight.
If you're wondering what your number is, the easiest way is probably just to follow what some tool tells you (I used Weight Watchers, then SparkPeople) and adjust the calories according to whether you are losing weight or not.
One caution: There is a rather large gap where you go from gaining weight to maintaining weight to losing weight. The area where you maintain weight is pretty broad. Finding that area is the first step, then slowly removing some calories until you start losing is the key, IMO. If you go too fast, you might remove too many calories and actually make it harder to lose weight than it should be. Your body will try to compensate for lack of calories.
I've lost weight many times without any exercise. The formula was pretty simple for me:
1) Eat on regular intervals. Don't starve yourself, but don't overeat. Typically you stop while you are a tiny bit hungry. The body is a bit slow on registering that you've had enough.
2) Cut out all sugary stuff, chocolate, ice cream, candy.
If you live in the US, it might be harder. My experience from living in the US was that it was hard to stay healthy there because
1) Almost all food contains some sugar
2) Served portions are usually way too large. And you buy things in too large quantities.
This means you might have to focus on cooking food from scratch at home to avoid the added sugar, and getting too large portions.
Don't cook larger portions to have left overs for later. You'll just eat more.
But if you are like me and can't be bothered to make food yourself, then buy EXPENSIVE food. This sounds silly but the thing is that when you buy cheap food, it doesn't taste well unless it is unhealthy.
Healthy food that tastes good is often expensive food. If you go to nice restaurants you tend to get smaller and healthier portions.
I waste a lot of money on food this way but it is just a trade off I've made. I rather waste money than get more unhealthy.
That will definitely work, but there must be some other factor at play. There are plenty of populations in the world that consume a lot of grain but do not necessarily suffer from increased rates of obesity.
They probably have cultures of smaller portions, less processed food, and less added sugar (especially drinks). Example: compare the size of a Japanese mosburger with a burger & fries meal in the US:
The more you can integrate moderate physical activity into your daily routine as a matter of getting things done rather than as a specific chore you have to do, the better. Cutting sugar consumption should also help. I'd start there and see what happens.
You can find online calculator to have an estimation of your metabolic rate. From there, subtract 500 kcal and count all the calories to eat everyday to make sure you're below your limite. A popular calories counting app is "fitness pal".
Two public schools I went to in the mid-west here had private pop vending machines installed up until like 6-7 years ago when people complained about them not being healthy. However what they replaced them with was 'vitaminwater' and fruit juice vending machines which contain just as many calories. In years before then they did hold out for awhile on pop machines but eventually gave in because kids would just stop at a nearby gas station or party store and bring pop in anyways.
Pizza wasn't uncommon but it wasn't like take-out pizza, it was a real cheap basic version that had much less grease and fat. They would on rare occasions make 'real' pizza or have some kind of 'real' food that people would devour, but in general the lunch food was a grade or two lower in quality than the cheapest shit you can buy at walmart. In many schools it is literally the same food/supplier as our prison food so all of it was somewhat questionable in nutrient content.
No, that's 100% accurate, at least when I was in school in the 90s-2000s. It actually got worse, as the old government subsidized food staples were phased out (government cheese, flour, potatoes, etc), that actually had to be cooked, and replaced with Sysco frozen products. I'm not sure whether this was actually cheaper than buying real food, or it was laziness.
Also the school breakfast programs were catastrophic, in my opinion. Again, no real food, just packaged donuts and danishes and sugar-laden cereals. It was arguably better when we had snack time instead, with milk and a bag of pretzels or Goldfish and a piece of fruit.
My daughter's elementary school has soda machines in it.
In the US, we don't like to fully fund education with tax money, which means our public schools need other sources of revenue to fill the gap. Junk food vending is a large and crucial funding source.
In Sweden, sweets and ice cream are banned at my kids' pre-school and school through the official system, but then a kid will move and have an ice cream sending-off celebration or an instructor switches jobs and does the same. Also, we just had celebrations for the start of summer vacations, with cookies and lemonade. So the ban is definitely not the complete ban that I would like, since they make constant exceptions for individuals to bring their own stuff and even serve it themselves on special occasions.
Both school and pre-school make it sound like they don't allow sweets, so it's very disingenuous. At least they're not served lemonade daily for lunch, and the afternoon snack is fruit.
As a Norwegian, I just want to add that Swedish candy shops are insane. I find it strange that your country doesn't have a lot more diabetic/obese people. Somebody has to be keeping those stores in business?
Some of the candy shops in Denmark seems to be used for money laundering.
Most candy is cheap to buy in volume and you just discard it rather than handing it to customers. Everything looks fine in the books. You just don't have as many customers in the shop as the accounting books says you have.
You will have to pay tax on the laundered money but that can be a small price for making the money fully legal and usable for e.g. house loans.
By the same argument there should be more alcoholics in deregulated alcohol markets in Europe. And I think there are, but is it a significant difference?
> The kids get involved early in learning about healthy food making and we get a cook book about what sort of food one should make for children when they start school.
How frequently is this curriculum revised and how are updates communicated to children after they graduate from that course/class/curriculum?
I'm mostly curiously because of how dietary research has changed and because there is little consensus on what a "bad" diet is. Almost everyone will agree to avoid sugar and processed food, but that's about where it ends. You also have to factor in individual genetics and lifestyle, although perhaps less so in countries like Norway where there would be a common genetic ancestry.
It isn't super detailed as far as I remember. It is more about the really obvious stuff like eating less processed and whole foods. So e.g. they will make whole grain bread, cut raw vegtables, maybe make vegtable soup, avoid stuff with lots of added sugar.
As far as I know the debate about health eating has centered around how much carbo hydrates we should eat and the role of fat. But I think eating less processed food, more whole grain and less sugar has always been accepted wisdom about healthy eating.
We Norwegians probably eat a bit much bread and potatoes and should probably eat more vegtables and alternatives such as beans, lentils etc. However I think we've been fairly good at avoiding too much sweets in the diet.
Michelle Obama suggested that kids eat apples at school and people here lost their shit over it. I'd love it if we banned sweets in schools but I just don't see it happening.
Imagine the public reaction to Melania suggest that kids eat apples at school, and I think you'll agree that outrage had nothing to do with nutrition in schools.
There would be a very small amount of praise from the right, a very small amount of jokes about her being a phone-it-in first lady from the left, and both would be overshadowed by an overwhelming amount of indifference by everyone.
> Imagine the public reaction to Melania suggest that kids eat apples at school
It's just an assumption to say that both sides are the same. Barbara and Laura Bush, for example, were not demonized like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama.
I think you misread OP’s comment—they’re not saying both sides are the same.
Moreover, generally democrats don’t stoop as low as republicans. Republicans attacked Chelsea Clinton when she was like 11—Rush Limbaugh was calling her ugly. Can you imagine any democrats calling Barron ugly or something as vicious? How about how Fox News harassed Obama’s kids? You’d never see that on CNN. Republicanism is a morally bankrupt ideology.
Right but democrats didn’t stand behind that type of rhetoric like republicans do. It’s just another example of the obvious hypocrisy of the Republican Party—the party of family values that voters for an adulterer with 3 wives, the party of fiscal responsibility that consistently drives up the federal deficit, the party of law and order that doesn’t apply the law equally, the party of Lincoln that now defends white nationalists, and of course the party of the military who ignores veterans and insults Gold Star families. What a crock.
Seriously? That is just sad. I suspect the issue in the US is that there isn't much common ground politically.
In Norway none of this is very controversial, and fast food companies have little political influence. Money in Norwegian politics is quite restricted. Not sure how it is now, but usually you could not pay for political TV ads.
If you wanted to get on TV you would have to join a political TV debate of which there are usually a lot of.
The description is in Norwegian but I can give a quick summary:
It gives recipes for breakfast, lunch boxes, food for hiking trips (hiking is very common in Norway), dinner, supper and snacks. The recipes are simple and tasty. There are discussion of what is healthy and what one should eat.
It has different authors. One of the co-authors is Rune Blomhoff who is nutritional science professor at university of Oslo and one of the leading researchers in the world on anti-oxydants.
In our book there are discussion for each dish what part of the food making the kids can participate in. It is to encourage children to learn about food themselves and get used to making healthy food themselves.
They don't celebrate by eating anything. They do activities instead. The focus is on the child who get a crown and gets to sit in this silly little royal chair or something. Not sure exactly how it works, but the kids are apparently very proud of it. I've only seen the pictures from when my son has had the crown
How is it dystopian? We ban kids from doing plenty of things we deem unsafe in the US. We don't let them drive, go to the store alone, drink alcohol, buy guns, get married, buy cigarettes, watch certain movies, play certain video games, get jobs, etc.
Knowing what we know about the long term impact of high-sugar diets, is it really that much of a stretch to limit intake?
You can look at my earlier answer to similar question. Nobody gets punished for not following the rules. We are not a police state. Parents participate in setting up the rules and conventions.
If you dump chocolate in your kids food box every day then the employees will simply talk to you about why it is a bad idea. They are not going to stop you or take away the chocolate.
This is also about consideration towards other parents and children. If one child has lots of candy in their food box you make the other kids envious and they start complaining to their parents about why they don't get candy. That is why it is good to have common guidelines on what kind of food parents should put in the lunch box of their kids.
Protecting underage members of society from potentially harmful substances that they are unlikely to consume in moderation is hardly dystopian; it is in fact a key responsibility of a well-functioning state. Alcohol is also banned at schools, for instance.
It is dystopian. And like clockwork, the top comment is about the state banning something, other statists/authoritarians here on HN applauding the effort, and your comment getting downvoted.
I wonder when the state will ban sugar from the homes too. These people don't understand what they're asking for - like the frog in boiling water.
How is it dystopian to tell parents that if you give your kids candy it makes the job for other parents much harder, since now their kids will fuzz about getting candy too?
It is just about people agreeing to common sensible rules for the benefit of everybody. It is about showing consideration for other people.
That is kind of frightening - why stop at school? Why not have Sweets Inspectors checking up on parents in their home? And talk about taking the fun out of any celebrations.
> That is kind of frightening - why stop at school? Why not have Sweets Inspectors checking up on parents in their home? And talk about taking the fun out of any celebrations.
I see what you're saying, but considering the exploding rates of obesity for children in the U.S., maybe dialling down some of that "fun" is necessary. There is overwhelming evidence that overconsumption of sugar is very unhealthy and fits the profile for addiction. I started looking at sugar the way I look at alcohol: to be consumed in minimal amounts, if at all. If one takes that view, measures such as those in Norway don't seem that extreme anymore.
Sugar doesn't really fit the profile for addiction, which requires tolerance, preoccupation, seeking, and not stopping even though you know it's harmful.
Sugar hits maybe one or two of those, but rarely all four.
> Sugar doesn't really fit the profile for addiction, which requires tolerance, preoccupation, seeking, and not stopping even though you know it's harmful.
It sure does. Tolerance manifests itself as insulin resistance. Preoccupation starts as soon as the blood glucose level drops, which happens at regular intervals on carbohydrate-rich diets, manifesting itself as cravings. Seeking is just a trip to the vending machine, and choosing the crepes and the donuts over the eggs and salads. Not stopping even though you know it's harmful? The struggle to fix one's diet is one of the hardest and most likely to fail as far as addictions go, as can be seen in the ever-increasing diabetes and obesity rates in the general population. It's certainly not because of a lack of awareness, even though a lot of people (and doctors) still think low-fat diets are the key to success.
> I work with people who have addictions. Sugar doesn't come close.
While I will defer to your experience with working with addicts, with respect I would suggest that the nature of your work may lead you to underestimate the addictive properties of sugar.
I am not claiming it compares with alcohol, meth, or crack cocaine addiction, but I think it is not unreasonable to compare its intensity to, say, coffee addiction. Except that in the case of sugar, the consequences can be chronic disease and premature death.
Research shows that sugar affects the brain reward pathways in a way similar to other drugs [1]. This contributes to its addictive properties in addition to those caused by the metabolic disruptions brought about by insulin resistance.
Still any sugar addiction is mild, in my opinion. For instance, when provided a good meal without sugar (say a nice restaurant on a date) do most folks get the shakes, leave halfway through the meal and run to an ice cream shop for a fix?
Its pretty easy to give up sugar for many people, for months at a time. Going back is probably laziness (easy availability, nostalgia) and not a physical compulsion.
Its common to throw words around like addiction when better words exist. Like habitual, or accustomed, or conditioned.
> Its common to throw words around like addiction when better words exist. Like habitual, or accustomed, or conditioned.
It's also common for attitudes to change very slowly with respect to something that has been around forever, that is available everywhere, and that can be safely used in moderation. It may be hard to accept that 'sugar addiction' is not an exaggeration; sugar brings to mind Valentine's Day, Halloween, and mom's apple pie, while addiction is associated with laying in the street, fatal overdoses, and ruined lives.
I certainly don't mean to say that everyone who likes sweets is automatically addicted to sugar. I use the term 'addiction' not to throw it around lightly, but because it is being used with its literal meaning by the medical professionals conducting said research, and because the usage is supported by the evidence (as can be seen in the links provided). That sugar addiction is being felt much less intensely than addictions to hard drugs, or that it can be overcome more easily, doesn't mean it doesn't fit the definition. Moreover, at a societal level, its consequences are just as dire (arguably, more so).
It's also interesting to look at the labels on our food in the US. Spaghetti sauce? Added sugar. Loaf of whole wheat bread? Added sugar. People may not see the addiction, but it's added to most everything right in front of our face.
Okay I realize I need to clarify some differences in American and Norwegian society. In America ban and rules often involve punishment or fines. In Scandinavia we have lots of rules and bans which carry no sort of punishment. This is one of them. No parent is getting a money fine, going to prison or get their kid kicked out of school because they bundle sweets in their lunch box.
So I think you are overreacting a tad here ;-) Also keep in mind this isn't exclusively a government thing. We have meeting were parents were the pre-school comes with suggestions and parents come with suggestions as well and people agree together on common rules.
"And talk about taking the fun out of any celebrations."
You can't have fun if there aren't sweets? That is sad? In a school there are lots of kids. If you celebrate with sweets for every single birthday through the year, and then in addition have your celebrations at home with sweets that ends up being a LOT of sugar.
I think you are trivializing the problem with sugar. Kids don't NEED processed sugar. There are lots of other things they can enjoy such as fruits, smoothies, yogurts and other good food.
The kids get involved early in learning about healthy food making and we get a cook book about what sort of food one should make for children when they start school.
This is something so serious for people's future and life that I don't think one can focus enough on it.