Today's topic is that children are addicted to chips, soft drinks, and other sugary drinks at a young age. These days, young children, or you could say, children as they grow up, develop a major addiction to something, and it's not their phones. It's not any kind of drug. It's soft drinks and chips, and parents tend to ignore this. They think, "Oh, it's just a child, they're only asking for one bag of chips," but that child will eat chips two or three times a day and drink soft drinks. That's not good for their health. It's not good for their bodies. Their bodies and digestive systems can't handle such heavy things. This is because children's bodies are very delicate and sensitive. They can't process these things easily, which will cause many problems for them later on. Their livers aren't developed enough to properly process harmful things like chips and soft drinks.
The chips, cold drinks, and soft drinks we give to children, in an attempt to win them over, contain a lot of chemical processes, ingredients, high sugar content, and many harmful chemicals. The World Health Organization has also reported on this many times. These snacks give us fat, bad cholesterol, and many other problems, and they negatively impact children's metabolism. But children are first attracted to these things by the fancy packaging and colorful advertisements, and they automatically become fans of them. Parents don't pay much attention, thinking that nothing will happen if their child eats them for a day or two. But you won't even realize when those one or two days turn into every day. Therefore, if your child is under 20 years old, or let's say 18 years old, only then should you allow them to eat these things, not before. Because they are not old enough to handle all of this, and eating these things is wrong at any age. No matter when you eat them, they will harm your body. But there is a limit, an age limit, beyond which you can consume them.
A normal child who goes to school consumes chips, wafers, and cold drinks two to three times a day, and this happens frequently. It increases even more during holidays and weekends, so imagine how addicted they become. This completely disrupts their daily eating habits. Instead of eating paratha or roti for breakfast, they prefer biscuits, wafers, and cold drinks, which are high in sugar and highly processed. This increases their cravings, and their addiction is further amplified by drinking sugary drinks every day. When they consume these sugary drinks every morning, their brain perceives it as something good entering the body. Therefore, the brain naturally releases dopamine, which makes children crave these things daily, reducing their craving for naturally nutritious food. Indirectly, this increases the chances of children falling ill.
Eating chips as a snack, especially regularly, is very bad for your health. If you ask any dietitian, health expert, or doctor whether you should ever eat chips or similar snacks, they will all say no. This is because these snacks are made from ingredients that offer no health benefits and contain no nutrients. They only cause harm. When your stomach is full of these snacks, it becomes difficult to consume naturally nutritious foods, and our bodies suffer the consequences. These things don't contain any nutrition. They lack iron, calcium, and vitamins, yet we keep consuming them. But this leads to many problems, such as deficiencies that cause fatigue and poor concentration, affecting school performance. Calcium deficiency puts bone health at risk, and within three weeks, you'll see a significant deficiency. This creates an unhealthy lifestyle pattern in children, which continues into adulthood, and the condition only worsens over time.
Lastly, I'll say that if you want to give it to them once a month or once a week, you can, there's no major problem with that. But if you let them get addicted to it and they start eating it every day, it can become a very serious problem because these things aren't meant for children. Actually, these things aren't meant for anyone. People might eat these things once in a while, but nobody eats them every day because they contain a lot of oil and all sorts of chemicals that can upset your stomach and damage your digestive system. And you know how much sugar and artificial coloring is added to soft drinks. Think about the problems caused by the coloring alone, and all the other chemicals added. That's why soft drinks are the worst option for your kidneys and your overall health.