Children’s cereals: Not good for breakfast anymore
-
- May
- 10
In my continuing effort to find studies that state the obvious, I stumbled upon this one the other day in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association.
Basically, the majority of cereals marketed to children (66 percent) “failed to meet national nutrition standards.”
The study looked at 161 cereals between January and February 2006 and classified 46 percent of those as “being marketed to children (eg, packaging contained a licensed character or contained an activity directed at children).” Fair ‘nuff.
If you ever walk down the cereal aisle in the supermarket (we keep Post and General Mills in business with our Cheerios and Honey Bunches of Oats purchases), you’ll see that the colorful, sugar-based cereals completely overwhelm the relatively healthful ones, which tend to be on the bottom shelf out of birds-eye view.
In other words, my son spots Shrek on a cereal box and he gets very excited. Or Batman. Or SpongeBob. Or Spiderman. Or any cartoon/comic book character.
We haven’t given in yet, but I have to say that Froot Loops are my favorite cereal and S’Mores cereal is my husband’s favorite.
I haven’t bought Froot Loops in years, but that’s mainly because I could probably eat an entire box in one sitting, it’s so addictive. I fear Froot Loops … yet I do love it so. And S’Mores, thank goodness, is rather hard to find. (I’ve been known to sneak in the closet and snag a couple of marshmallows out of it. Shhh! Don’t tell my husband!) And neither of those cereals are finding their way into my kids’ hands.
But, basically, cereal not marketed for children is generally more nutritious, the study said. “Overall, there were important differences in nutritional quality between children’s cereals and nonchildren’s cereals.”
How’s them apples? Doesn’t that seem a bit backward?
And while it doesn’t surprise me at all, it does make me mad.
We wonder why Americans are getting more obese? Sheesh.
Associated Press file photo of a typical supermarket cereal shelf by Dale Atkins.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 8:09 am by Amy Vernon.
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My favorite cereal is Reeses Puffs. But likewise, that is why I do not EVER buy it. I could eat the whole box too. (In one sitting)
Thanks Hema for a good article on cereals. There is a way to make most of the breakfast cereals for children more healthful. Add your own sugar but make sure it is a health sugar that will benefit the body of the children. There are published papers that verify that the sugar trehalose is, indeed, beneficial for the body and is considered a brain food by many. Information on trehalose is posted on my blog which is at www.endowmentmed.org
JC
Tough! Listen. Cereal is just that. its milled/processed grain. eating it plain would be like eating sawdust. Hence you liven it up. Shall we go back to the good “olde” days? Listen we have technology. So sugar etc are added.. and???
No one says to eat the whole box. I am tired of loosing good food because other’s overeat and blame the companies for making the product. DONT EAT IT!
There will be more for me and my family then…
Thank you.. This has been Steve C’s 3 cent public service announcement.
;-]
LOL, SuperHealthy.
JC – excellent point. When I was a wee one, I put sugar on my corn flakes. But the flakes weren’t already coated in sugar. My parents could ensure that I wasn’t pouring a days’ worth of sugar onto my breakfast.
Steve – As I point out to JC, I have nothing against putting sugar on cereal. The problem is that the majority of cereals now have so much sugar (and lots of it is corn syrup, which may be made from corn, which is natural, but there ain’t nothin’ natural about corn syrup) that even having the amount listed as a single serving on the box is putting a tremendous amount of sugar in our little ones’ bodies.
And when I each Cheerios with my son, I put raisins in it to sweeten it up a bit. There’s lots of ways to sweeten cereal without having to resort to completely artifical garbage that only very vaguely resembles food.
As much as I love Froot Loops, this world would not suffer one iota if Froot Loops were no longer made. When it comes to these cereals, it’s hard to argue that they’re “good food.”