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

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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.

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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.

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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

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