Helping Kids Make Healthy Choices

A guest post by PaulL.

I read in the Herald that the public health lobbyists are concerned that the previous government didn’t act to ban fizzy drinks and juices in schools, and the new government isn’t particularly interested in it.

I especially liked this quote from Tinetti that it is:

disappointing to hear the Government isn’t progressing work to help kids make healthy choices at school

To me, you’re not helping kids to make choices if you’re taking their choices away. You’re restricting what options they have so that they don’t learn to make choices at all.

Really this is about not selling fizzy drinks or juices in the school tuck shop. The problem is that these things are perfectly fine as a treat (which is what the tuck shop should be for), they’re not fine every day. A small number of kids are having them every day, so the proposed solution is to ban them for every kid.

It’s a particularly Orwellian turn of phrase, and very much betrays the thinking that pervades Labour.