Shops should reduce the sugar, not remove the cartoons, from kids’ cereals

Children’s cereals contain 40 per cent more sugar than those marketed at adults. Isn’t that the real problem?

Jenny Eclair
Tuesday 07 January 2020 01:02 GMT
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Weight loss expert criticised over suggestion fat parents are to blame for childhood obesity

As the first week of the new decade comes to an end, how many of us have already given up on our new year’s resolutions? Good luck, then, to the supermarket Lidl which, in an effort to help parents fight the war against childhood obesity, has promised to phase out cartoon characters on all its own-brand cereal boxes by spring of this year.

I’m a child of the Sixties – I grew up with a bowl of sugar permanently on the kitchen table. My mother, however, was fabulously mean when it came to handing out snacks: my sister and I were only allowed to share a small bar of chocolate after school. One of us cut the bar, the other got to choose which half she fancied. Cutting that chocolate bar made me incredibly tense, in case my sister got chocolate more than me. To this day I am extremely good at halving things.

As I got older and began receiving pocket money, I spent it all on sweets. I’m of the cola cube, sherbet fountain and midget gem generation; my sweetshop was filled to the rafters with jars of multi-coloured sweets which were then weighed by an old person wearing a cardigan before being deposited into a pink and white-striped paper bag.

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