I have always done it since I was a child.
It's been such a great tradition for us so it's so easy to follow it
once they got old enough to pick their own.
Everybody does it here in Sweden, so we do it too, but I don't know why.
But I know that Sweden is quite famous for our small candy, so
it's very typically Swedish.
I'm Sofi Tegsveden Deveaux,
and I am an author and a lecturer on Swedish culture.
The tradition to eat sweets once a week started right
after the Second World War and there was an experiment,
it's not a very sort of ethically correct experiment,
according to today's standards,
but they gave sweets to mental health patients,
and by doing that they could
study the effects of sugar on dental health and they could actually,
for the first time, have any sort of scientific evidence
that there was a link between sugar intake and poor dental health.
If you eat candy all week long and constantly,
then you create an environment for the cavity bacterias to constantly grow,
so it's better to eat just at one occasion,
and you can eat as much as you want and then brush your teeth.
I think a lot of Swedes followed the advice at that time,
and I think this got to do with the fact that at that moment,
the welfare state was being built up, there was a lot of progress in society
and the general trust in public authorities was very high.
And I think it's also a very convenient way
for parents to sort of limit their children's sugar intake
and find a structure in life.
And this is something I think parents worldwide struggle with.
Mostly it's a tool
for managing candy, that there's no asking about candy
during the week and if they do it's not Saturday
so it's really a good way to control the sugar, in a way.
But then it's an event. They get to choose where we go,
which store do we go and then they take their time.
It feels like a big part of the fun is to choose and to plan what am I gonna get.
You could say that this candy eating on Saturdays
has improved dental health in Sweden quite a lot,
but also that we are brushing our teeth more than we used to.
And we are also eating better food in general.
And dental care in Sweden, for children, it goes up
to the age of twenty three, so you can say
that cavity problems are looked after quite rapidly if they occur.
There are figures saying that people are eating more and more sweets midweek,
and they're also drinking in the middle of the week,
which is not necessarily the traditional way of doing things here,
but I think society is becoming more and more diverse
and we're getting inspired by lifestyles everywhere.
But for the majority.
I think this is a tradition that will stick around for quite a while.
We've been doing it for a long time, when I was a kid in the 80s,
then we did it me and my sister and all my friends did it,
and my friends that have got kids,
they still do it with their children so it's pretty deeply rooted in our candy mind,
so it will probably continue for a while I think.