Healthy eating

YOUR DOUBLE page extract from ‘Healthy Home Cooking for Kids’ troubled me. I am finding a growing trend for recipes touted as ‘‘healthy’’ simply because they miss out whatever is on that year’s nutritional blacklist. For example, this year seems to be the year where sugar is the new bogeyman.

Now I am no nutritional expert, and am not in anyway saying it’s fine for kids to eat loads of sugar, but I am very suspicious of any book that shouts ‘‘No butter. No white flour. No added sugar’’. I saw this statement and immediately thought I bet those things are just replaced with something very similar. And that was exactly the case. Just one example (I haven’t seen the whole book and don’t want to) is the cupcakes. No butter but half a cup of oil! No sugar but half a cup of honey! No white flour but plenty of wholemeal! The cupcakes would be no better for a child than usual ones made with butter, sugar and flour.

Even worse, though, is because the recipe comes under this big banner shouting ‘‘healthy food’’, parents may mistakenly believe the food is great for kids and they should eat as much as they like. Clearly not the case. Hopefully most parents can see through all this ‘‘healthy’’ marketing bumph and just continue to make their own recipes with normal, unprocessed ingredients. No need to buy a whole recipe book for that!

Emily van Stokkum, Wellington