The industry responds to the accusation that breakfast cereals have too much sugar.
In 1941, the Food and Nutrition Council of the American Medical Association was created presented with a new product, Vi-Chocolin, a chocolate bar fortified with vitamins, “ostensibly offered as a special product of high nutritional value and of some usefulness in medicine, but in reality intended for promotion to the public as a general-purpose sweet “, a vitamin-rich sweet.” Surely something like that couldn’t happen today, right? Unfortunately, that is the business model of the sugary cereal industry.
As I analyze it in my video. Are fortified breakfast cereals for kids healthy or just sweet?Nutrients are added to breakfast cereals “as a marketing gimmick”create an aura of health… If these nutrients were added to soft drinks or sweets, would we encourage children to consume them more frequently? Would we give our children Coca-Cola and Snickers for breakfast? We could also sprinkle cotton candy with vitamins. As a medical journal publisher read, “Adding vitamins and minerals to sugary cereals… is worse than useless. The subtle message that accompanies these products is that it is safe to eat more.”
Advertising campaign “Grow strong with Big G children’s cereals” from General Mills presented products like Lucky Charms, Trix and Cocoa Puffs. That’s how the dairy industry. promoting ice cream as a way to get calcium. children who eat Sweetened breakfast cereals can get more than 20 percent of their daily calories from added sugar, as you can see below and at 1:28 in my video.
Most of the sugar in the American diet. arrives of beverages such as soft drinks, but breakfast cereals represent the third food source of added sugars in the diets of children and adolescents, located between sweets and ice cream. Per serving, there is more added sugar in a cereal like Frosted Flakes than in a glazed chocolate cake, a brownie, or even a glazed donut, as you can see below and at 1:48 in my video.
Kellogg’s and General Mills maintain that breakfast cereals only contribute a “relatively small amount” of sugar to children’s diets, less than soft drinks, for example. “This is a perfect example of the social psychology phenomenon of “diffusion of responsibility.” This behavior is analogous to every restaurant in the country arguing that it should not be required to ban smoking because it only contributes a small fraction to Americans’ exposure to secondhand smoke.” In fact, “every source of added sugar…should be reduced.”
The industry maintains that most of its cereals have less than 10 grams of sugar per serving, but when Consumer Reports Measured As for how much cereal the youth actually served themselves, it was found that they served themselves about 50 percent more than the suggested serving size for most of the cereals tested. The average serving of Frosted Flakes served contained 18 grams of sugar, which is equivalent to 4½ teaspoons or 6 packets of sugar. It has been estimated that a “child eating “A daily serving of children’s cereal containing the average amount of sugar would consume almost 1,000 teaspoons of sugar in a year.”
General Mills offers the “Mary Poppins defense,” arguing that those spoonfuls of sugar can “aid the medicine goes down” and explaining that “if the sugar were removed from the bran cereal, it would have the consistency of sawdust.” As you can see below and at minute 3:17 in my video, a General Mills representative wrote that the company is presented with “an untenable choice between making our healthy foods unpalatable or refraining from advertising them.” If you can’t add sugar to your cereals, would they be unpleasant? If sugar has to be added to a product to make it edible, that should tell us something. That is a characteristic of the so-called ultra-processed foods, in which you have to pack They fill them with things like sugar, salt and flavorings “to give flavor to foods that have had their [natural] intrinsic flavors processed from them and to mask any unpleasant flavors in the final product.”
The president of the Cereal Institute argued that without sugary cereals, children may not eat breakfast at all. (This is similar to the dairy industry’s arguments that removing chocolate milk from school cafeterias may cause students to “stop buying school lunches”). He also emphasized that we must consider the alternatives. As Kellogg’s chief nutrition officer once put it: “I suggest that fruit [sic] Loops as a snack are much better than chips or a sweet roll.” You know there’s a problem when the only way to make your product look good is to compare it to Pringles and Cinnabon.
Do you want a healthier option? Watch my video Which is better breakfast: cereal or oatmeal?.
To learn more about the effects of sugar on the body and if you like these more politically charged videos, check out the related posts below.
Finally, for some additional cereal videos, check out Children’s breakfast cereals as nutritional facade and Ochratoxin in breakfast cereals.
