This column article was an attempt to begin exploring a huge and complex area in relation to the multifaceted experiences both personal and cultural with regards to food and health.
Trick or Treat?
Talk of food treats can buy into a minefield of emotions and unhelpful associations.
“Diabetes doesn’t mean you can’t have nice food but perhaps only as an occasional treat.” This is a fairly typical response for a dietician or diabetes nurse when a patient asks about high fat/sugar foods in their diet. It’s an important issue for patients and has implications for general health and blood glucose management – too much saturated fat or sugar will compromise their health and more restrictiveness will damage maintenance of their lifestyle changes will lead to more serious relapses.
So the necessity of “a little of what you fancy” is not in doubt here. However, I am interested in expanding an understanding of the pre-existing associations will emerge connected to the word TREAT. What do I mean by that? Here’s another popular sentence with the word treat…
“Now if you are very good you can have a treat later.”
I defy readers not to recognise these words from their childhoods and here is the point. Treats are intimately linked with the pattern of our childhood parental relationships, layered with the joys and woes of discipline, behaviour, manipulation, reward, love and self-worth.
Perhaps that sounds like the point is overstated but we have some evidence that treats are deeply rooted in our early experiences. More than 80% of parents admit to using snacks as a pacifier with their children (Sherry et al, 2004) and various reports of eating habits from six months to adolescence show as much as 25% of a toddler or child’s daily calorie intake comes from high fat snacks like crisps, cakes and biscuits, and fruit flavoured drinks with added sugar (Skinner et al, 2004; Roblin, 2007). It’s a familiar scenario for parents, a convenient snack and juice cup is a very handy weapon to mollify a fractious toddler when you are out shopping or in the car, or the promise of a treat in exchange for better (or less publicly embarrassing) behaviour. Furthermore, parents, particularly mothers’ choices of food with their children are loaded with poignant emotions and worries for their children (Pagnini, 2007).
This has implications when we think about the rising level of obesity for future generations. But let’s return to our current adult patients who have experienced these food and parental relationships in the past. One of the most significant differences between child and adulthood and the perception of food treats is that the child is entirely dependent on the parent for the availability of treats. Truly a treat is only a treat because of how and from whom we receive it.
The adult however, is completely independent of anyone’s involvement in their choices of food – there isn’t anyone to beg or cajole for a treat, no one to make us feel rewarded by having a treat. In fact it ceases to be a treat at all because no one is responsible for your adult choices. The fact that as adults we still feel a warm, comfy glow when we treat ourselves is simply a harkening back to that childhood time. A chocolate or a cake or a sherbet dab is not a treat – it’s just food. Talking treats might just trick us into behaving like children again.
References
Roblin L. (2007). Childhood obesity: food, nutrient, and eating-habit trends and influences.. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. Aug;32(4):635-45.
Skinner JD, Ziegler P, Pac S, Devaney B. (2004) Meal and snack patterns of infants and toddlers. J Am Diet Assoc. Jan;104(1 Suppl 1):s65-70.
Sherry, J. McDivitt, L. Birch, F. Cook, S. Sanders, J. Prish, L. Francis, K. Scanlon (2004) Attitudes, practices, and concerns about child feeding and child weight status among socioeconomically diverse white, Hispanic, and African-American mothers. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Volume 104, Issue 2, Pages 215-221 B.
Pagnini DL, Wilkenfeld RL, King LA, Booth ML, Booth SL. (2007) Mothers of pre-school children talk about childhood overweight and obesity: The Weight of Opinion study. J Paediatr Child Health. 2007 Sep 4
