Let Them Eat Cake!

From Australia’s best known nutritionist Rosemary Stanton, now being quoted left, right and centre, including here, where I saw it.

The message that comes across to kids is ‘it’s OK to eat cake because Bindi Irwin does’ I think it’s very sad.’

She’s talking about the fact that Bindi Irwin (daughter of the late Steve Irwin) is appearing in ads for Green’s General Foods packet cakes.

Now, I’m personally not a fan of packet cakes, and when I have children, I will not be encouraging their use. I do however love baking, and will happily be making non-packet cakes for/with aforementioned children. The idea that its sad for children to think its ok to eat cake is just, well, sad!

I’m not saying that children should eat nothing but cake, all day, every day. But I do think that if children are allowed cake sometimes and it’s not a big deal, they’ll have a much more balanced view of food than the child who is never ever allowed cake – because that child will set out to eat all the cake in the world as soon as they’re old enough to manage it. Criminalising food is a sure fire way to disordered eating.

It is of course possible that Rosemary Stanton was entirely misquoted here, but she does appear to be one of the proponents of the “diets don’t work – lifestyle changes do” illogic (I continue to be baffled as to how otherwise intelligent people don’t see the contradictions in that thought). This interview is littered with it:

Well, diets basically don’t work. The population is getting fatter and we’ve got a huge problem, so everybody is trying to grasp at a straw… the realistic solution is that it takes time to lose weight and you really need to change your eating and your exercise habits to something you can live with. Any diet you go on, you’ll lose weight. But as soon as you go off the diet, you’ll regain that weight and you usually regain more than you actually lost. So you’re worse off after a series of diets than you were in the first place.

I have a problem with any sort of diet. Really what you need is to change people’s eating and exercise habits permanently.

I think the search for the perfect diet is the problem. We keep thinking there is going to be some magic solution – some magic way we can eat that’s going to solve this whole problem. It just doesn’t work. Any diet works in the short term. No diet works in the long term.

Yeah.

On some level, I agree with what she’s trying to do. Encouraging people to eat more fresh foods, more fruits and vegetables and less “junk” is admirable – but claiming that it’s never ok to give children cake just strikes me as ridiculous. I think her heart is in the right place, but just a little too far from centre.

And to end, this quote really resonated with me, but possibly not in the way she intended.

…there’s also an inner need to overcome the fact that so many people, I think, are influenced by things that are wrong. There’s so many pressures on people… to believe certain things… I see people having things put over them all the time now. Whether it’s the latest diet – whether it’s some public relations release that some food is the absolute answer to all their nutritional problems.

What do you think of Rosemary Stanton?

Regardless, as far as the children go, I say let them eat cake!