Toddlers’ diet - New kind of child abuse

It is hard to describe the situation reported by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland yesterday, where children as young as six months were given soft drinks, chocolate cake and crisps, as anything other than child abuse.

Though this was the most alarming detail in the report, it focussed on our cultural antipathy to breast feeding babies, a reluctance that may have negative long-term consequences for our children’s health.

It was truly alarming though that the FSAI found that 15% of parents had so little regard, through ignorance or indifference, for their baby’s health that they gave them the kind of food at the root of the obesity epidemic. As any parent knows the eating habits developed at an early age have a real long-term impact on a person’s health.