Report: Sweetened Kids’ Cereals Have Even More Sugar Than Once Thought; What Can Parents Do?

The supermarket aisle most parents avoid going down when their young children are in tow is the cereal aisle. Hard to blame them. With alluring and captivating cartoon characters on virtually every box of cereal that’s loaded with sugar, it’s like dangling beef in front of a hungry canine.

But just as dog lovers like to reward man’s best friend with treats now and then, parents also reward kids with their favorite treats on occasion. But according to a new report set to be published in November, one might want to reward with cereal-based treats about half as often as is done at present. Why? Because many of these cereals contain about 50 percent more sugar than their nutritional facts let on!

Consumer Reports is set to unveil in their November issue that many cereals – Post’s Golden Crisp and Kellogg’s Honey Smacks being the chief violators – contain more than 50 percent sugar when measured by weight. That means that half of all the ingredients that make up a breakfast cereal is pure sugar! Talk about a sugar rush!

The report lists several well-known cereals kids and parents are familiar with as chief offenders, all of them containing at least 40 percent sugar by weight, including Golden Grahams, Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, Trix and Lucky Charms.

There were at least some good cereals among the 27 analyzed – four “very good” cereals, to be precise. Cheerios, Life, Honey Nut Cheerios and Kix were all cereals deemed “very good” by Consumer Reports because they contained relatively low amounts of sugar and high amounts of fiber per serving (1 cup of Cheerios has less than one gram of sugar and about three grams of fiber).

Another interesting finding in the study was how these cereals measured up to the same cereals sold in European countries. For instance, compared to countries like Germany, Slovenia and Switzerland, the European Honey Smacks contained less sugar than America’s version (40 percent vs. 55 percent sugar by weight). This is a rather troublesome find; apparently, the American kid’s taste palette craves a more sugary sensation than the European one.

So, how does a parent deal with their kids’ sweet tooth, especially when he or she has been giving in to their desires for years now, believing the cereals’ nutrition facts were legitimate? Health professionals suggest mixing half with Cheerios and half with Froot Loops, or whatever their favorite sugary cereal is.

I agree with this suggestion – but I’d change the cereals themselves. Thanks to organic varieties of cereals that are virtually identical to Cheerios and Froot Loops – only with more quality ingredients – you can make breakfast a whole lot healthier. Instead of Cheerios, where one of its primary ingredients is modified corn starch, Purely O’s contains ingredients like organic whole oat flour and organic barley flour. And instead of Froot Loops, where the primary ingredients are sugar and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, Rainbow Rings have organic corn meal and evaporated cane juice as its primary ingredients. Two much healthier options.

By mixing these and other organic sweetened and unsweetened cereals, you can gradually reduce the amount of sweetened cereal to the point where the lion’s share of the mix is the more nutritional one (Purely O’s over Rainbow Rings). The trick is trying to re-work their taste palettes to the point where they no longer need loads of sugar to sate their sweet tooth. A slow and steady shift (even if it’s as slow as one fewer Ring, and one more O, with each bowl) will win that race.