Do you, or your children, eat cereal for breakfast?
So, over the past few days there has been a LOT of coverage over childhood obesity and how the government plan on fixing this. As usual, their plans couldn’t be further from actually fixing the problem if they tried. Their solution is to replace snacks (crisps, chocolate etc) with fruit – or sugar with fructose (form of sugar_.
Obviously, fruit is better than those snack, but its not the solution at all. Snacking on fruit is fine… but it brings up the question “why do our kids need to snack”? What is causing them to want to eat between meals?
The answer is all down to what we eat at breakfast. More importantly, what we DON’T eat at breakfast.
As per the attached image…. lets take a look at some popular children’s cereal. Some well known popular brands i have picked – Frosties, Sugar Puffs, Krave, Coco Pops, Cheerio’s & Crunchy Nut.
I have also given what the nutritional profile of each of these breakfasts are, and how much sugar is in each “portion”. Now i use the word “portion” loosely here…. why?
Well, they recommend that a portion of cereal is 30g with milk. Have you ever actually weighed 30g of cereal to see how much you actually get in a bowel…… not a lot! As you can see from the photo, 30g of cereal is about 2 hand full’s and that’s if you have particularly small hands.
The first thing to note and question here is “How much are you actually eating?”. I can guarantee you its more than 30 grams. Most people will fill their bowels up half way to three quarters of the way up, then full the rest with milk.
Leaving that to one side for a moment, lets concentrate on just how much sugar is in these portions and then try to work out what the issue is here!
Frosties = 17g per serving
Sugar Puffs = 10.5g per serving
Krave = 15g per serving
Coco Pops = 17g per serving
Cheerio’s = 12.3g per serving
Crunchy Nut = 17g per serving
For most of them, you are look at about 50% of the cereal being sugar. Lets just take a second to think about that… in a 30g bowel of coco pops, OVER HALF of it is sugar. We’ve already established, above, that we probably eat a lot more than 30 grams in a serving, so just think about how much sugar you are actually eating at breakfast – or even your children are eating. Now lets also not forget the amount of sugar some people ALSO sprinkle on top of the cereal. Do you also have toast for breakfast? Jam on the toast? Nutella on the toast? Glass of orange juice perhaps? Sugar, sugar and more sugar! Its actually quite scary to think about…
I’m not even going to focus on the lack of protein or fats in the cereal for this post, but just take note that its bugger all for ALL of them. Also, where there are fats presents, its certainly not the good essential fats we need.
So what am i getting at here, apart from the obvious that the amount of sugar we are eating at breakfast is alarming, to say the least?
The original issue i addressed, above, was to do with the rise in childhood obesity and what is the root cause. Now there are many root causes… however, i strongly believe that the breakfast we are feeding our children is high up on the list. Its definitely in the top 3 main issues – the other two being lack of exercise and pure education on nutrition.
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