All children love sweet tasting food items such as chocolates, wafers, cookies, cakes, sweets, candies, just to name a few. In fact, manufacturers of such food products focus their marketing strategies on children as they are the major consumers compared to the general adult population.
 

Most advertisements on television for this kind of food products usually feature children as the main characters happily indulging themselves in whatever product the commercial is trying to sell. When their attention is captured, the next stage involved persuading their parents to buy the advertised food item for them or rather spending their pocket money on it during recess period in schools. In the latter case, the parents are not able to monitor their children’s choice of food and they might not even know what their kids are buying and eating.

If they overindulge themselves with such food, it might lead to a lot of unhealthy consequences. As an adult, have you ever tried eating the sweet tasting snacks that your children love so much? It will not be an exaggeration to generalise that all of them are too sweet because of their high sugar content.

As we all know, eating too much sugar, direct or indirect, is unhealthy and can result in obesity which is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. These are all unfortunately treatable but incurable diseases. In addition, too much of sugar intake is also associated with tooth decay. Whenever you eat food that contains sugar or drink sweet tasting beverage, bacteria which is naturally present on your teeth will use the sugar to form acid, leading to tooth decay.
 

Since it is impossible to keep a close eye on what your children are eating 24 hours a day, is it not the right time for the Government to step in and impose a strict standard for the maximum content of sugar allowed to be added in such food items?

Setting up such a regulation can also reduce the amount of ringgit spent annually on sugar import by Malaysia. Although Malaysia does produce sugar, the quantity produced is not sufficient for its own use. To make matters worse, we are one of the top countries worldwide as far as sugar consumption is concerned. This finding was done by taking into consideration the annual amount of sugar imported by Malaysia and the total population of the country.