Your Kid’s Appetite Must Not Exceed 100 Calories

Anyone who has contact with children under five will know how much they love a specific kind of sticky oat bar. My 3 year old can inhale two or three of these bars in one sitting to sate his unpredictable appetite. So I was relieved when the manufacturer launched a new Big Kid version. I picked up a box, assuming they’d be more filling than their Little Kid counterpart, oblivious to the fact that kids' appetites are being policed before they even hit preschool. 

The new Big Kid Organix bar is 94kcal/bar versus 123kcal/ bar – almost 25% smaller than the OG.

In what world does it make sense that as kids grow, we give them less to eat?

The more I looked around the aisles, the more I noticed the 100kcal cap on snacks aimed at primary school aged kids. These calorie controlled snacks are the legacy of a Public Health England (PHE) initiative called Change 4 Life (C4L). The campaign was part of PHE’s broader suite of policies to reduce energy intake in the population - despite evidence that the average Brit consumes less calories today than they did in the 50s. In 2018, C4L launched a campaign targeting kids’ snacking, with the tagline ‘100 calorie snacks, twice a day max’. Cute! In a disordered kind of way. While it only ran for two months, the impact can still be felt today.

Industry responded by reformulating their existing products into orderly, 100 calorie units - delineating the ‘right’ amount of food a kid should eat. Curly Wurlys are now 17% smaller than they used to be. This mum counted only six Monster Much in her kids’ multipack bag, which are 50% smaller than the grab bag counterpart. Soreen bars, Frazzles, Freddos, Dairylea Dunkers, Coco Pops cereal bars and Jammie Dodgers Minis all brag on the front of packaging how they’re ‘under 100 calories’. Not only is tagging these products as ‘school compliant’ a neat marketing tool, it signals rampant policing of lunchboxes in the dining hall. 

The campaign claimed to make it easier for parents and carers to support their kids to eat healthier – not through measures such as universal free school meals, universal basic income, or affordable quality child care – but through calorie counting and policing the amount they feed their children. Even within our narrow frameworks of what constitutes being ‘healthy’, we can probably all agree that 6 year olds counting calories is not it. 

In the intervening years since parents and carers were tasked with micromanaging kids’ snacks, C4L has morphed into ‘Better Health’. Superficially, they appear to no longer sanction calorie counting, their catchphrase shapeshifting to: ‘... if the kids are having packaged snacks, just remember to aim for 2 a day max’. But thanks to the influence of the earlier campaign, it’s damn near impossible to find a packaged kids’ snack over 100 calories.