Energy Guidance Complete

My childhood contained many spoonfuls of sugar. It started off with sweetened formula. There were doughnuts and ice cream, sugar cubes and sodas. Lollipops and candy canes were gifts at doctor appointments and my parents’ business friends’ offices. Halloween provided weeks of sugary treats. The other holidays had their special sweet treats and customary sweet dishes. My family’s snack drawer was full of snack cakes, cookies, and sno balls. At school, lunches included a sweet treat and the food provided was often sweetened. For breakfast, I ate sweetened cereals, sweetened oatmeal, and instant breakfast drinks.  Family trips to the local ice cream parlors and baseball games led to sweet celebrations galore.  Iced tea was always sweetened as were the fresh strawberries. Sunday morning pancakes smothered with imitation maple syrup were the weekly food highlight. Crackers, canned savory foods, spreads, and fast foods were sweetened as well. My diet was sweet foods with occasional breaks for the unsweetened things. I think that my diet was typical of children growing up in the 60s and 70s in the United States. All that sweetness influenced my health, my eating habits, and my thinking.

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This blog post is written to parents and grandparents to make them aware that their choices to sweeten the lives of their children and grandchildren delivers misery instead of the intended happiness. Sweetening a child’s life is love misguided.

Note: This blog post is not my opinion although I do agree with it. The wisdom presented here is straight from Spirit.

Parents and grandparents,

“Most of our diet is meant to be non-sweet. The sweet part should be about 8%, and of that 8%, all should be from natural sources—that is how our bodies are designed. .” …from the post “Sweeteners: The Facts“

More than 8% sweetness leads to:

• changed appetite (wanting foods for their sweetness rather than for their satisfaction of hunger)
• emotional turmoil
• malfunctioning of the processes that handle sweetness
• reduced resilience of body parts (for example, teeth)
• illness
• compromised attention capabilities
• over-desire for sweetness
• reduced muscle activity
• feelings of negativity towards self

from the post “The Facts: Living in a World of Sweetened Sustenance”

Through sweets, well-meaning parents feed their children emotional turmoil and compromised attention capabilities. These changes to natural temperament and attentiveness cause problems with peers and in school.

Through sweets, well-intentioned parents offer their children reduced resilience of body parts as rewards for good behavior and grades. Even parents who know the facts about sweetness succumb to societal pressure to provide their children with changed appetite and over-desire for sweetness. Combating the pervasiveness of sweetness in society is not easy.

Rewarding children using sweets that contribute to feelings of negativity towards themselves is building people who are unsure of themselves. Rewarding children with causers of malfunctioning of the processes that handle sweetness is mistaken gifting.

Sweets that are natural, such as fruit and pure maple syrup, are building unless they exceed the 8% limit. Sweets that are destructive, such as sugar and corn syrup, cause disruptions in functioning and in future functioning.

Going against the typical way of pushing sweets onto children is not easy. Defying the advertisers and makers of sweet things is work. Understanding what you are doing each time you give your child a soda or a candy bar or a sweetened cereal, might help you change your outlook on how you stock your house and how you supply nutrition to the children you love with all your heart.