Poor old St Stephen: we never really get to raise a toast in his honour because we’re all lumbering about like sumo champions, thanks to those extra helpings too many the previous day.

So perhaps our, er, horizontal challenges are not the best topic today. But! It’s the week where we all tend to get a bit frantic about New Year’s resolutions, and so it’s the moment to make my pitch for one main, nationwide resolution: ban the soft drinks.

Here’s why: we may be Europe’s smallest state but we are one of the heaviest. In fact, the winners of this year’s obesity stakes for Europe, according to a recent European Commission survey, are: the UK (24 per cent of the population), Ireland (23 per cent) and Malta (22 per cent).

Sadly, lately we’ve been hogging the prizes for all kinds of negative ‘awards’ (see: smoking, binge-drinking, and so on).

The nations that take the prizes for being the most slim and trim are France (only 11 per cent are obese) and Italy (10 per cent obesity).

This I find mind-bogglingly ironic. We are as Mediterranean as the French or Italian. We live just a stone’s throw away from the land of the buon appetito. So what’s wrong?

On paper we should all be following a Mediterranean diet with fish and seasonal vegetables. Do we? No we don’t. Here’s why:

For some odd reason – very odd considering we practically all live by the seaside – many Maltese do not like fish.

Ditto vegetables. Our diet is really based on carbs: bread and pasta.

Instead of drizzling olive oil, we reach out for the ghastly margarine or some horrid kind of oil which promises to lower cholesterol (why oh why do we have this obsession with cholesterol?)

We have a culture of eating massive portions of food – the saying ‘kul ħa tikber’ is taken as a maxim.

We’re hooked on soft drinks.

And this last point, I think, is the worst of all. If you ask any major supermarket for the top 10 list of sold items, soft drink six-packs top the records.

Dr John Briffa, the London-based Maltese doctor, says that according to research, each daily serving (about 300 mls) of soft drink is associated with a staggering 60 per cent increase in a child’s risk of obesity. The sugar (or aspartame) content in soft drinks is no top secret, and yet we a nation of soft drink guzzlers.

The truth is we still live in an era where to ask politely for a refreshing glass of water, with perhaps a slice of lemon, is considered an act of sheer rudeness. “What? Water? No way! Have some Kinnie or Coke or Sprite…”

There must be some social and cultural explanation to this – was there a time when soft drinks were more expensive and marked the epitome of a middle-class home? Perhaps at one point soft drinks in the house indicated you were a pulita?

The terrible thing is that we really start them early: at my local supermarket every Saturday I always bump into a mother with her one-year old in the trolley-seat sucking cola from his bottle. This, I have to say, makes me hyperventilate, and one of these days I just might grab that baby bottle and crush it under the trolley wheels.

I’ll never do it obviously, I’m such a softie I’d be scared the fierce-looking, heavyweight mummy would thwack me in the head with her sharp-stilettoed white boots.

There is only one solution: we need to go back to Mediterranean basics. The other day I was at a party and the father of a two-year-old was talking about how his daughter is fascinated whenever she sees a bottle of wine.

“We warn her that it’s ‘bad water’ but it doesn’t put her off.” Duh. We all know the story of the forbidden fruit.

And, excuse me, why should ‘wine’ be called ‘bad water’? Soft drinks are the ‘bad water’. I’m not saying the supermarket mummy should replace the cola in her son’s bottle with wine, but really, why can’t we expose children positively to wine?

In Italy, wine is always on the table, next to a jug of water, irrelevant whether there are children present for the meal or not. It’s part of the food culture.

Soft drinks rarely feature, however. And look at them: their alcohol and their obesity problems are minimal.

These are good enough reasons for Malta to embrace a soft drink-free new year. Bring on the wine and toast to St Stephen for, God knows, we need his intercession to stick to this resolution.

krischetcuti@gmail.com

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