August 2015
It’s that time of year again when, on the rare occasions the sun comes out, the Met Office issues health warnings and the media tell us not to go outside otherwise we’ll get skin cancer or burn to death. More recently, they’ve decided we all need reminding every five minutes that we need to drink and, I’m sorry, but that really shouldn’t be necessary. Anyone who is too stupid to realise they are thirsty is obviously too stupid to be alive in the first place and deserves to dehydrate to death. Even my one year old son knows when he needs a drink and he’ll toddle up to his water bottle and consume as much as he needs. If he can’t reach his water bottle, he’ll cry and scream until one of the giants gives it to him. If it’s out of sight, he’ll cry and scream until one of the giants figures out what he’s crying and screaming about and it doesn’t take a genius to realise if a baby is crying and hasn’t got a bump on his head or a colossal turd in his nappy, they are obviously hungry or thirsty. I don’t need a news reporter to tell me that.
People just like telling other people what to do. Again, as a parent, I get “advice” from people all the time. Even from people who aren’t parents. At first everyone was telling me I needed to get my son into a routine because children need a routine. No they don’t. Adults need a routine, children don’t care. They are like puppies: As long as they get food, sleep and played with regularly, they couldn’t care less what time it happens. Plus children who are used to a routine are probably more likely to throw a tantrum when the routine is changed.
When my son was first born, he suffered from colic. This meant he struggled to sleep and needed comforting. So for the first few months he slept in the bed with me and my wife. It was the only way any of us managed to get sleep. Of course certain people told us we shouldn’t do that because he’ll get used to it and we’ll never get him out of the habit. Again, what kind of logic is that? All he wanted was to be close to mummy and daddy giant and he couldn’t care less where he slept. Once his colic cleared up he went back to sleeping in his cot. Even now he sleeps on the sofa, in his pushchair, in his high chair and even on the floor. As soon as he went into his own bedroom he slept just fine.
There are all these guidelines so-called “experts” like to give about what children should do, where they should do it, what they should eat, when, where, how much and it’s all nonsense. It basically assumes that all children are the same. They aren’t. I’m also curious to know at what age we’re supposed to stop trying to fatten babies up and start trying to prevent them from getting fat. I mean for the first few months we are encouraged to feed our babies their own weight in milk every hour because there is a guideline weight babies of certain sizes are supposed to be.
Once a baby begins to look a bit like a midget sumo wrestler, all these so called experts then tell us that the child is obese and needs to stop eating. We’re always hearing on the news about how the country’s obesity problem is down to McDonalds and Mars Bars and Gary Lineker, all of which is complete nonsense and just a convenient excuse for the general laziness and poor lifestyle of the average idiot.
Having managed to ban smoking and almost ban drinking, these nanny-state organisations have now decided to turn their attention to sugar. We are now all being told that we should stop eating sugar because it will make us all fat and, I’m sorry, but anyone who truly believes sugar will make them fat is an idiot. Whilst it has no nutritional value, there is nothing to the stuff other than very fast burning calories which, unless you are incapable of physically moving, will get burnt off very fast by the body. Also why isn’t anyone making a noise about all the chemicals that go into sweeteners and other alternatives to sugar? Surely that can’t be good for the body.
There’s no real logic to any of these decisions. For example, there was that absurd situation a few years ago where Mars Bar were forced to stop selling those gigantic bars because apparently that made people fat so what they did instead was fit two smaller bars into the same sized packet and sold it as a “Mars Duo”. That, apparently, is okay.
Tesco has recently decided to stop selling Ribena because apparently it contains a bit too much sugar. Seriously, if Tesco were that bothered about how much sugar was being sold, why don’t they just stop selling bags of sugar? It’s not the first time Tesco have tried to appease the thought police either. A year or so back they decided to stop selling sweets at checkout tills because they believed it would solve the world’s flabbiness. No, what would solve the world’s obesity problem is if people had a little bit of self control and the media stopped telling people what to do.
So while I sit here writing this outside in the sun with no suntan lotion on, eating a Mars Bar, a doughnut and drinking a large can of Relentless, which has more caffeine and sugar than a million cups of coffee, while my one year old son is calmly toddling around happy and content with a carton of Ribena, I’d just like to state for the record that I’m 34 years old and I haven’t yet died and I’m still only 11 stone. What does the world health organisation want to tell me about that?
