EASTER IS eagerly anticipated by greedy children aged from seven to 70. For weeks, the shops have been displaying mouth-watering pyramids of Easter eggs, chocolate bunnies and ducks, with sugary eggs in baskets woven in genuine willow or modelled in icing sugar. It is nursery heaven.

Traditional descriptions of paradise promise milk and honey, and other less mentionable alluring temptations, but for those who have never progressed beyond the age of seven, Fortnum & Mason’s food hall will have to do. But is the food we eat at Easter likely to hasten the time when we can really find out what Paradise, or something hotter, will offer, or will it postpone the day when we need to explain away our gluttony and other sins to the Archangel Gabriel and St Michael?

When I was a child Good Friday included hot cross buns for breakfast, and nothing thereafter until the long church service was over. Late lunch was, of course, fish. Hot cross buns are suspiciously sweet and certainly most are not made of wholemeal flour, although recently these have been obtainable. As the Atkins diet becomes yesterday’s fad, the emphasis is now on the glycaemic index.

Regular readers of this column will have been alerted to this years ago. Everyone needs a balanced diet of fat, carbohydrate and protein. By understanding the glycaemic index of carbohydrates, with preference being given to foods with a low glycaemic index, carbohydrates can be taken without damaging health.

We have to reconcile ourselves to an inescapable fact, that we, like rats and pigs, are omnivorous, and that some carbohydrate is not only enjoyable, but essential.

This does not mean that we shouldn’t take our carbohydrate in a form that is only slowly absorbed into the bloodstream. The lower the glycaemic index, the more slowly the carbohydrate is absorbed and the less likely it is to excite over-production of insulin by the pancreas. Surges of insulin inevitably induce insulin resistance in the tissues. Conversely, the higher the glycaemic index the faster the carbohydrate is absorbed. All breads have a suitably low glycaemic index rating and can be included in the diet but they vary. Only on such a special day as Good Friday should we have hot cross buns; on other days we need the whole grains. In my childhood fish on Fridays was as much part of the dietary calendar as a roast joint on Sundays. We also had herrings and bloaters in prodigious amounts, a privilege of living in Norfolk. No one then realised that having oily fish twice a week was reputed to work miracles with a developing brain. None of my medical relatives who gathered around our dining-room table then had any knowledge of Omega 3 and Omega 6. These are essential fatty acids and the balance between the intake of these two fatty acids, as well as the overall quantity of each, is important for intellectual and physical development. If children are to win scholarships it is important that the omega 3 found in oily fish should be a prominent part, not less than twice a week, of their mother’s diet when they are pregnant and of their children’s diet in early life.

The chocolate gorged in such quantities over Easter is not as bad for health as people suppose. Certainly, the fat in chocolate will put up the level of cholesterol in the blood, but the damage this wreaks is to some extent compensated by the flavonoids in chocolate, because these are cardioprotective. Those who make a point of buying chocolate should always select the dark chocolate containing 70 per cent cocoa-bean solids.

The Aztecs realised that chocolate had an aphrodisiac value, especially when mixed with herbs such as vanilla and hot peppers. In more sophisticated 21st-century Britain it is not the aphrodisiac value derived from the phenylethylamine in chocolate that is important, but the feel-good factor. Phenylethylamine is a chemical that induces a sense of wellbeing.

Easter Day, like Christmas Day, has its hazards. The worst of these for those in accident and emergency is inhaled and swallowed parts of toys. Some chocolates are still sold with small toys, often ones that come apart so that their constituent pieces are even smaller than the original booty. Everything that a small child handles is tested in the mouth. Watch out for freebies with hazards hidden within the egg.