Healthify your supermarket choices.
Good News!? Less Sugar Soon in Kids’ Cereals
General Mills, one of the big 4 cereal manufacturers, including brands such as Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Trix, and Wheaties, announced yesterday that it will reduce the added sugar in its products. More specifically, the sugar in cereals advertised to kids will be reduced to “single digit” levels, according to the press release headlines. Reading the fine print of the comapny’s release, which basically extols General Mills as the best thing to happen to healthy diets since the invention of food processing, we learn that “by spring General Mills cereals advertised to children will all have 11 grams of sugar per serving or less.”
What you need to know:
The first thing you should know is that “11″ is not a single digit. 11 grams of sugar is still almost 3 teaspoons of sugar, and that’s for serving sizes for 4 year olds.
Nonetheless, General Mills should be commended for taking a step in the right direction. If all manufacturers follow suit, maybe in 2011 they can do another down round, and reduce added sugar to 1 teaspoon’s worth.
Here are two further improvements that General Mills can make:
- remove artificial colorings from all cereals. Red 40 and others have been linked to hyperactivity in children.
- stop using BHT to preserve freshness. BHT is also suspected of causing hyperactivity and cancer.
What to do at the supermarket:
Your children do not need a sugar rush first thing in the morning. Look for cereals that contain less than 6 grams of sugar. You can always add more at home.
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Excellent points about the behavior altering chemicals.
Didn’t they do this a couple of years ago, I remember buying Reduced Sugar Cocoa Puffs (pregnancy craving) and they tasted super sweet. I bet they could reduce the sugar by 1/3 and nobody would notice.
It’s hard to find cereal with less than 6 grams of sugar, even the “healthy” organic ones. I like to combine cereals, a sweet one with a non-sweetened one to get the right mix.
Are they simply reducing the sugar or are they reducing and then ADDING artificial sweeteners in an attempt to keep it tasting as sweet?
i made lucky charms cereal for 35 years and during the last 10 years general mill’s has been coating the charms cereal with titanium dioxide to make it white.they do not have to declare it on package as long as it is less than 1 percent of ingredients.this stuff is paint it does not come off the dairy tile floor when being made it is a mined mineral and contains traces of arsenic and lead which is declared as parts per million.i made this cereal and would never feed it to my children can you imagine how it coats the intestines like paint.this could also cause other problems in kid’s and no one will ever think it could be from eating a kid’s cereal
please check out this cereal and advise people on what they are eating
i think that cereal is amaizing and breakfast is the most important meal of the day. go junk food