Thank you for the information on Xylitol, I am nervous about feeding them strange sweeteners. My normal policy is (for them not myself sadly) smaller or less frequent portions rather than artificial sweeteners (or low fat). (My definition of artificial sweetener is not necessarily consistent with anything else.)
I agree that ‘treats’ are out of control, one difficulty is that when everyone else is getting so many how do I make sure that I don’t seem to be so much a tyrant that they then go off the rails. (I don’t mind being a tyrant if it works out well.) I do know a couple of people who took the low sugar thing too far (too far = further than me) and it didn’t end well. The children have such easy access to sweet shops, vending machines and friends with similar access if they feel deprived they can overreact at a later date.
I think that teeth are okay at the moment as treats tend to be consumed with meals as are any sweetened drinks.
We just made ‘Strawberry yoghurt’ this evening, but it was more of a drink. 100g Greek yoghurt, 100g strawberries blended hard and I would happily drink that again. In fact I will once I am at an intermittent fasting stage. The kids weren’t impressed so I added 5g sugar. Next time I will add 4g and see how low I can go. I am in no rush to get this right I have several years of errors to correct.
I need to revisit the bread aisle. I haven’t eaten any for over 7 weeks, but once I return to eating it now and again I will need to make sure our bread is okay. The reason I asked about low sugar bread is that in the book Michael states that some brown breads have extra sugar to make the taste more palatable.
And then as we switch away from honey or jam on toast to Marmite we hit the too much salt problem which is probably a problem for a different website!