If you had bumped into me at the mall this morning you might have thought I’d gone crazy. My regular readers will know that I’m a health journalist with an autoimmune disease and that, among other things, I prioritise eating well. Indeed, I regularly write about my struggles with healthy eating in this mad world which seems set against me. So upon seeing me at the mall with a shopping bag full of sweets and treats, it would have been easy to assume that I’d fallen off the wagon. But in fact my candy-buying-binge was all in the name of... Read full article »

My three-year-old son had been offered junk food for what seemed like the millionth time in just a few days, and was looking at me with pleading eyes as if to say “pleeeeease Mum!?” The person offering him the glossy-on-the-outside, but empty-on-the-inside snack was doing it because they thought they were being nice. They wanted to make their time together special and (probably unconsciously) thought that the way to go about it was to give him a “treat.” The problem is that it wasn’t special, or a treat. It was crap. The ingredients on the label read more like a... Read full article »