Heavily Marketed Kids Cereals High In Sugar

Here’s a newsflash. Makers of children’s cereals who advertiser to kids the most are the ones most likely loaded with sugar and starved of fiber. The obvious was revealed during a new study conducted by Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. The study found that an average American child sees 642 cereal ads each year. But the cereals most often advertised are those that contain 85 percent more sugar, 60 percent less fiber and 60 percent more sodium than those marketed to their parents.

You could call it the icing on the cake, but those cereal ads are also more apt to have Web sites with groovy games for kids. Which make them more appealing to our children, and cause roaring riots when shopping with your child at the grocery store.

Some of the biggest offenders include Cocoa Puffs, Cap’n Crunch, Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which contain between 44 to 32 percent  sugar. The advertised cereal with the worst nutrition score is Reese’s Puffs.

The truly shocking thing is that only 8 percent of the 19 heavily advertised cereals targeted to children meet sugar limits to qualify for inclusion in the USDA’s Women, Infants and Children program. But they do meet the cereal industry’s own nutrition standards to be a “better-for-you” food, earning them a green checkmark logo on the fronts of the packages.

The Food and Drug Administration says those little checkmarks may mislead consumers about the health benefits of foods such as those sugary cereals, and vowed to crack down on manufacturers. The FDA, however, did not say when it would enforce those claims.

Source: Cereal Facts.org