Sugar is guilty as charged – Tom Watson is right to target Tony the Tiger and other cutesy cereal hawkers

Why hasn’t this happened already? Or maybe you wondered why you don’t see gin adverts on Nickelodeon

Labour’s Tom Watson calling for a ban on the cutesy cartoon characters that feature on kids’ breakfast cereal packets. Shocking. Shocking!

Here’s one of the current generation of British politicians with a thoroughly good idea. It shook me to the core. It simply didn’t seem possible in the midst of the current Brexit farce.

But wait – how can waving a fist at the ad industry and going all nanny state over harmless breakfast fun be characterised as a good idea? That’s what I imagine a lot of people will be asking at this point.

Here’s the thing: cereal isn’t harmless.

When Watson gave a speech to an Advertising Association conference, he pitched up with an image that looked as if it had come from a horror movie rather than an ad.

It featured a jar full of sugar-rotted teeth extracted from people’s mouths. When I looked at it, I felt slightly sick and was reminded of those pictures of fouled body parts they put on cigarette packets.

There’s a reason for my raising the latter. Cigarettes used to be advertised and marketed with rare skill. Remember the Marlboro Man? The brooding high plains drifter in a cowboy hat? You have to be of a certain age because we sent him off to prune the cacti in the painted desert in the sky.

It was because of the effect he was having on the health of the generations of young men he encouraged to smoke. That image was catnip to them. They wanted to be that man. Spark up a pack of Marlboros and join the Magnificent Seven!

With people twitching about tar, and the strength of the ciggies in the iconic red Marlboro cartons, along came Marlboro Lights in a fashionable gold one. They proved hugely popular with young women (and not a few men as well).

Marketing, advertising, branding. It works. Companies spend vast sums of money on it because it’s an investment that pays off every time.

The introduction of generic packaging on cigarettes, when combined with other restrictions, has played an important role in the reduction in the number of people who smoke, greatly benefitting the nation’s collective health.

Sugar, however, is dragging it down.

We know that refined sugar is profoundly unhealthy. We’ve known it for years. People were talking about it rotting your teeth when I was a kid.

It also has addictive qualities. There’s a reason people talk about having sugar cravings and experiencing a sugar rush.

Our children are easy prey to those marketing it.

Those cereal box cartoon characters are far more enticing than a picture of a bowl of much-lower-sugar bran flakes on a table, even before they get to the sweet payoff when they break into the box. The one reinforces the other.

Get rid of the characters and you might get rid of some of the compunction.

It’s actually something of a surprise that it has taken until now for someone like Watson to make the point, given the way we place restrictions on any number of harmful, or potentially harmful, products. Or did you wonder why you don’t see gin adverts on Nickelodeon? Or bookies offering bets on the next scrape Gumball and his family get into. Alco-pops? They got extinguished faster than a lit cigarette under a Doc Martens boot, and with good reason.

But, but, but, isn’t it down to the parents to just say no?

Funny how often it is that people who aren’t actively parenting like to say that. I’m thinking here of the self-righteous and entitled grandparents who weren’t always that good at saying no themselves when they were doing it.

Yes, parents should say no, but parenting is a hard job, as I know from personal experience. How about we try helping them for a change? Getting rid of those toons would do that.

Watson made the point that with younger children, those aged 18 months to three years and four to 10 years, the largest source of so-called free sugar in their diet is “cereal and cereal products” (31 per cent and 33 per cent respectively).

For teenagers, cereal is second only to the sugar intake from sugary soft drinks.

The health conditions that can follow – obesity, type 2 diabetes, tooth decay and so on – there’s nothing cutesy about them.

I’m not a member of the sugar police. I’m not one of those people who would snatch a packet of Haribos out of a child’s hand and substitute it for a lettuce leaf at a food court.

But we need to recognise that sugary cereals are a potentially harmful product, and to regulate them and the way they are marketed accordingly.