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?

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.

Fast-forward to the 1990s and my teenage daughter’s first job, in a chichi “vintage” sweetshop kitted out to look and smell like my childhood.

Kids like sugar – ’twas ever thus. Sadly, though, it seems they like it a bit too much, and the fact is too many children today are too fat.

Calling people “fat” these days is a political and social minefield and as ever, I find myself stuck in the middle of it. Whilst I loathe the media’s obsession with weight and the damage social media can do young people, I can’t quite embrace the new “happy to be very fat” culture.

This is probably down to my own hang-ups. Over the years, I’ve been thin and I’ve been chunky; at the moment, I probably weigh a good stone more than I should. What can I say? I’m an ex-anorexic who has recovered rather too well. But if I’m going to lose any weight now, it will be through exercise; my diet is perfectly healthy (she says, inhaling crisps and brie).

But whilst adults may choose to be overweight, is it fair to inflict fatness on a child? Again, I’m inclined to sit on the fence when it comes to blaming parents for chubby kids. Some kids are born chubby, with meaty feet and bracelets of fat; they’re just not designed to be sylphs. Equally, there are kids who are genetically predisposed to be all gristle and bone, with knobbly wrists and skinny feet.

The question is: will Lidl’s plan to remove cartoon characters from cereal packets make any difference? It’s a bold move, when statistics prove that cartoon characters are responsible for much of the dreaded in-store “pester power”. How many of us have bought a box of junk just to keep the brat in the trolley quiet?

Cereal manufacturers have been playing with kids’ minds for decades. Back in my day, it was Tony the Tiger and Snap, Crackle and Pop, three elf brothers who were joined back in the space-obsessed Fifties by Pow, who, despite arriving in a hovercraft, never really took off.

Of course, it’s not just cartoon characters that have been used to tempt children. Once upon a time, when health and safety didn’t exist, manufacturers had us shoving our fists into the boxes in order to find “the toy”: usually some small piece of plastic, like a soldier or submarine. These sugar-coated trinkets more or less disappeared in 1988 after Kellogg’s had to recall 30 million miniature flutes and binoculars after they were deemed choking hazards. Now, all you get in your cereal packet is... well, sugar mostly.

The fact is cereal is cheap; it’s convenient; kids can eat it even when they’re half asleep. But nutritionally, apart from the calcium in any milk that gets added to the bowl, they’re mostly rubbish, with children’s cereals containing 40 per cent more sugar than those marketed at adults.

Surely this is where the real problem lies? Here’s a novel idea: why not keep the cartoon characters and simply remove all that extra sugar? That way everyone would be happy – and I bet the kids wouldn’t even notice.