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The cost is not only money and nutrition. It is the birthday party where they cannot have the cake and the lunch table where their food is different every day. Children notice that, and so do other children. Where there is a documented reason, it is a price worth paying. Where there is not, it is a price for nothing.
Who has forbidden the adornment and the nourishment God has provided for His servants? (Quran 7:32). The question is asked in defence of what is lawful and enjoyable, which is worth remembering before a child is handed a list of nos.
الأعراف
قُلۡ مَنۡ حَرَّمَ زِينَةَ ٱللَّهِ ٱلَّتِيٓ أَخۡرَجَ لِعِبَادِهِۦ وَٱلطَّيِّبَٰتِ مِنَ ٱلرِّزۡقِۚ قُلۡ هِيَ لِلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ فِي ٱلۡحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنۡيَا خَالِصَةࣰ يَوۡمَ ٱلۡقِيَٰمَةِۗ كَذَٰلِكَ نُفَصِّلُ ٱلۡأٓيَٰتِ لِقَوۡمࣲ يَعۡلَمُونَ
Say [Prophet], ‘Who has forbidden the adornment and the nourishment God has provided for His servants?’ Say, ‘They are [allowed] for those who believe during the life of this world: they will be theirs alone on the Day of Resurrection.’ This is how We make Our revelation clear for those who understand
Qur’an 7:32read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review found that children and adolescents eating closer to a Mediterranean pattern had fewer psychiatric symptoms across the studies included. Almost all of those studies were cross sectional, photographing diet and symptoms at the same moment, so they cannot say which came first. That is the general shape of children's diet research: patterns worth noticing, not grounds for putting one particular child on a restrictive diet.
Camprodon-Boadas P, Gil-Dominguez A, De la Serna E, Sugranyes G, Lázaro I, Baeza I. (2025). Mediterranean Diet and Mental Health in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review.. Nutrition reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A diet that answers no actual problem takes things away without giving anything back.
None of this applies where coeliac disease or an allergy has been diagnosed, since there the exclusion is medical and not optional.
Saying a difficulty is in the past is not the same as saying it was never real. Sometimes a picture changes because something that was making it worse got taken away, and the honest words for that are neither cured nor imagining it.
Some foods are formulated to be hard to stop eating. That is a design brief rather than a flaw in you, and it goes some way to explaining why one particular snack is the one you think about at eleven at night.
The vitamin D in a general multivitamin is a maintenance amount, nowhere near what is used to correct a real deficiency. If your level is genuinely low, that is a prescribing conversation with blood tests behind it, not a shelf in the chemist.