Sugar?! In kids' cereals? I don't believe it!

Hey, cereals marketed to kids often aren't that nutritious! Some of them even have a lot of sugar! Who knew?!

Pretty much everyone, you'd think. Even as sugar-befuddled kids watching Saturday-morning TV, my brother and I managed to grasp the meaning of "part of a nutritious breakfast." And if "part of" wasn't a dead giveaway, the shot of a bowl of cereal accompanied by an orange, toast and a glass of milk certainly was.

If you need all that to make a foodstuff even remotely redeeming, you might not have made the most healthful of breakfast choices. And as a parent, if you don't allow yourself to realize this, you're a lot better at self-deception than your kids. (They understand it's junk. They want it anyway.)

Take out the cereal from that shot and, frankly, the meal would be a lot closer to the breakfast a growing body needs. And the head attached to that body might be less likely to nod off during math.

In any case, Consumer Reports has parsed the nutrition content, or lack thereof, in such treats and found them, shall we say, lacking.

The report is available online to subscribers only, but here's U.S. News & World Report's version. Kellogg's Honey Smacks and Post Golden Crisp come in for special criticism.

If you're shocked -- shocked! -- by this analysis, here are a few primers on how to read a food label -- from the Food and Drug Administration, from the University of Iowa and from the American Heart Assn. (be forewarned, that last one comes in a PDF file -- tsk, such effort).

Then again, you could just say to heck with all that work (the information won't be pretty) and automatically view foods marketed by cartoons as suspect.

Got the message but can't give up the sweet stuff? Take a tip from a former Saturday-morning-TV aficionado: The cereals make a delightfully retro low-fat dessert.

Come on. They are vitamin-fortified.

-- Tami Dennis

Comments

[Blanche Nonken]

Hey, weren't those two cereals originally called "Sugar Smacks" and "Sugar Crisp?"

And note this. I have worked as a lunch lady, and under the National School Meal Program's nutritional guidelines, manufacturers have to take those prepackaged cereals and replace a significant part of the sugars with artificial sweeteners. If your kid gets free or reduced breakfast as part of the school meal program, odds are that child is not picking the best choices, and starting off his or her day with a nice helping of artificial sweeteners and colors. As the parents or guardians, you are allowed to stop in, read the ingredients and restrict the choices your child can make for his or her meal to healthier products IF THEY ARE AVAILABLE IN YOUR SCHOOL.

[beatupfromfeetup]

Cereal is a cop out for patents who care more about their time than the childs health. Otherwise it takes 5 mintues to scramble eggs and microwave bacon! Oh and toast and small juice (sugar).

[c lykins]

A Taiwanese friend brought us some candy that kids in Taiwan love. My kids liked it too. It tasted exactly like cold cereal.

[Norris Hall]

For years the food industry has been peddling "candy in a cereal box" to parent under the guise of being a nutritious morning meal.
In fact breakfast cereal is mostly candy disguised as breakfast.
Our family cut out boxed cereals years ago because the kids were using them like candy.
Now they've gotten use to eating fresh fruit for breakfast....much better for you and at half the cost of boxed cereals...which are 50 percent sugar and 50 percent advertising.

[Mike]

Hmmm, I wondered what they were frosting those flakes with....

[The Truth]

These cereals exploded in marketing and popularity during the early 80s and have been around for decades before then. If you were a kid in the 80s you were a nobody unless you downed boxes worth of sugar frosted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Mr. T and Super Mario Bros cereal on a weekly basis. I'm sure these 80s franchised cereals put Honey Smacks' sugar content to shame. What I'm trying to say is that any new obesity trend has little to do with cereal. It has more to do with inactivity than anything else. Sure NES was popular in the 80s but every kid still played backyard football, kick the can, capture the flag, biked around town, etc on an almost daily basis. Now parents and kids are told that playing Wii is exercise. Kids no longer throw footballs and get roughed up playing backyard sports. Contemporary lazy parents don't care though, they love Wii, it contains their kids to the living room all day, night and through the weekend.

Plus feeding your kids Whoopers and burritos on a daily basis because you're too lazy to make homemade food is a real problem, not sugar cereal. No matter the cereal it at least gets kids to ingest vitamin enriched food with milk.

This is yet another scapegoat for lazy parenting.

[adam sirois]

"The Truth" brings up a great point: inactivity among children is reaching epidemic-proportions.

But it's not just "lazy parenting." It's lazy parents. The report goes on to reveal that 58% of cereal that is marketed to children is consumed by people over 18.

Adults need to start eating better and living more active lifestyles because children are going to follow the example we set.

The cereal giants spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising sugary cereal to children. Too bad some of that cannot go toward creating healthy cereals that also taste good.

adam sirois
[me] & goji, founder
custom artisanal cereal

[Mike]

I'm shocked!!

Does this mean that years ago, when Sugar Crisp and Sugar Pops were renamed Honey Smacks and Golden Pops the sugar was not replaced with honey and gold?

Why...that's downright misleading!

[S. Erbe]

I am a grad student in the school of communications at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., researching mixed messages on kids ready-to-eat cereals. I contend that confusing (and sometimes false) food labels make it difficult for parents to make informed nutritional decisions. I'm trying to determine if consumers (parents) desire improved food labeling--for example, unit of cost per unit of nutrition. If you purchase ready-to-eat cereal for kids, please take my survey at http://www.polldaddy.com/s/07158CB2CCCE5E07/. It takes 10 minutes or less. Thank you!