Limit Kids Snacks To Only 200 Calories A Day

The Change4Life campaign wants parents to give their children a maximum of two snacks a day containing no more than 100 calories each, not including fruit and vegetables.

According to the PHE’s National Diet and Nutritional Survey, children between the ages of four and 10 consumed 51.2 per cent of their sugar from unhealthy snacks, including biscuits, cakes, pastries, buns, sweets and fizzy and juice drinks.

For example one Barney bear is over 100 calories and half a mars bar is also 100 calories.

Last month, the health body also urged British men and women to reduce their intake of calories to just 1,600 a day, which included 400 calories for breakfast, 600 for lunch and 600 for dinner, without drinks, the Daily Mail reported.

Now I’m all for healthy eating and a healthy life style but I don’t like the idea of calorie counting for children or monitoring my children’s diets to this extreme.

My personal beliefs are that if you are checking labels all the time your child may grow up with an unhealthy body image and feel they are fat or unhealthy.

Equally if you do not allow your child to have sweets or treats when they are older and attend birthday parties or get money to go to a shop they will binge on all the sugary snacks they have missed out on.

Everything in moderation, yes limit sugary and high salt intake foods but to the extremes of monitoring ever morsel of food that enters their bodies.

Childhood obesity is on the rise but this is not solely down to sugary snacks, many families have both parents working now days so time to make good home-made meals is limited, the easy alternative is ready meals which arent the most ideal.

Children aren’t playing out so much and spending far more time on computer games or sat in front of the tv.

So if you want to have a healthy happy well-balanced child, eat better yourself, prepare meals in advance, walk more and get your children into sports clubs like football or gymnastics.

There is no need to calorie count snacks if you have a varied diet and exercise regularly.

Please let me know your views, will you limit your child to 200 calories of snacks a day?