Are We Turning Our Children into Snackheads?

When I was a girl, my mother would not allow me or my siblings to snack within an hour of suppertime because it would "ruin" our dinner. Like most women of her day, my mother had enough sense to realize if we filled ourselves up with Cheese Doodles and Hostess cupcakes, we wouldn't be hungry for more than a few polite bites of her broiled chicken and string beans.

Fifty years later, not only are many mothers allowing their children to snack before meals, they are encouraging it.

As evidence of this disturbing trend, a recent Los Angeles Times article recounted the story of a basketball coach who had the radical idea of asking parents to refrain from the usual after game snack ritual. The horrified parents quickly nixed the coach's proposal. As one mother told the Times: "Some parents got really upset and said, 'But our kids expect a snack.'"

Perhaps fearing a lynch mob (or having his house egged with Cadbury Cremes), the coach backed down, and the children continued to get their fix, I mean snacks of chips, candies, cookies and sugar-filled "sports" drinks.

Turning children into snackheads

One doesn't need to study the medical literature to know that children do not come out of the womb expecting a salty or sugary empty-calorie snack right before lunch or dinner. If the children on this coach's basketball team were expecting a snack, it is only because they had been habituated by their parents to have food rewards every time they do something marginally positive. Like rats in a maze who gets reinforced with food for certain behaviors, these children have turned into snackheads, sugary and salty food addicts who need to snack at regular intervals or go through withdrawal.

The L.A. Times website was just one of many on the Internet buzzing about a new report published in the March issue of Health Affairs by University of North Carolina nutritionists Barry M. Popkin and Carmen Piernas, a study that may serve as an alarm bell for parents who push snacks on their children, as well as ammunition for child health advocates, such as the beleaguered basketball coach.

Children eating more snack calories

The snacking study found that children are now snacking almost three times a day - an increase of about 27% since the mid-1970s - and they are snacking on less healthy foods. Since the 1970s, sugary juice has largely replaced milk as the beverage of choice, the latter of which at least contains healthy calcium and protein. Even though fruit juice contains some vitamins, it is less healthy than eating an actual piece of fruit, consumption of which has dropped in favor of candy, cookies, chips and empty calorie snacks. In the worst case scenario, some parents confuse less expensive "juice drinks," which contain only 10% fruit juice (and are mainly just liquified sugar), with somewhat healthier 100% fruit juice.

Compounding the fact that children are consuming less healthy snacks, the percentage of children who snack between meals has also increased since the mid-70s - from 74 percent to 98 percent, turning America into a nation of snackheads.

Snack pushers target the very young

Perhaps most alarming is Boston Globe writer Lylah Alphonse's observation that children who snack the most are the youngest children, helpless creatures who lack transportation and money and whose parents have the most control over what foods are in front of them (to use a Palinesque term). As Alphonse wrote on her parenting blog: "I thought the age group with the largest snacking increase would be teenagers -- they eat pretty much everything that isn't nailed down, right? Wrong. Young kids, age 2 to 6, were the ones who consumed the most calories via snacks."

What Alphonse and the Health Affairs study highlight is that children are replacing healthy meals with salty and sugary snacks at higher numbers because that is the food their parents are giving them. Snack pushing parents are creating a generation of snackheads, not unlike the friendly looking Joe Camel who pushed cigarettes at children a generation ago.

Michele Obama campaigns for snackhead recovery

First Lady Michelle Obama will no doubt cite the recent North Carolina study in her "Let's Move" campaign to reduce childhood obesity. She, too, blames parents for turning their children into snackheads (although she does not use the term snackhead). "Our kids didn't do this to themselves," Obama told a group of dieticians at the National Nutrition Association. "From fast food, to vending machines packed with chips and candy, to a la carte lines, we tempt our kids with all kinds of unhealthy choices every day."

Rehab for snackheads?

Who knows? With celebrities like Tiger Woods and Lindsay Lohan making the rehab concept so glamorous these days, maybe someone will start a rehab for snackhead children. All they have to do is hire women like my mother - the generation who wanted to be parents, not buddies - adults who aren't afraid to tell children to put away the potato chips or they'll ruin their dinner.

Sources:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/02/science/la-sci-snacks2-2010mar02
http://www.boston.com/community/moms/blogs/child_caring/2010/03/kids_get_27_percent_of_their_calories_from_junk_food.html
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2010/03/03/study-showing-rise-in-snacking-by-children-generates-discussion/
http://www.postchronicle.com/news/health/article_212287360.shtml?rssfeed
http://children.webmd.com/news/20100302/kids-snacking-too-much