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Cereal 
Mon Jun 28, 2010 at 18:04:27 PM PDT
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It's not just the food we have to worry about, but as we know from such additives as BPA, it's the things we package it in that can harm us as well and now there is a recall in Cereal's because the actual packaging is making KIDS sick.
It was a rough weekend for some well-known American brands: Kellogg's recalled 28 million boxes of children's cereals because of a "waxy-like" taste in the liner that has caused diarrhea and vomiting in a few people.
And Kellog's isn't even being forthcoming on what exactly it is that is making people sick!
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Sun Nov 01, 2009 at 22:03:52 PM PST
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A new report, Evaluating the Quality and Marketing of Children's Cereals (PDF) by The Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, took a look at breakfast cereal and cereal marketing. They picked on cereal because, for one thing, cereal accounts for 1/4 of all food and beverage advertising seen by kids. Also, two years ago, three out of four major cereal companies pledged to "self-regulate." Sooo... did it work? Of course not.
And while you can read the findings below, there is one thing I want to point out up here. Remember how that Smart Choices labeling program was made fun of for calling Froot Loops a "Smart Choice"? Well, as you'll see below, Froot Loops fell into the LOWEST category of nutritional rankings by this study. Lower than Cookie Crisp, Cocoa Puff Combos, and Cookie Crunch. In other words, they would have been hard pressed to pick a less healthy cereal if they TRIED.
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Sat Sep 05, 2009 at 00:13:29 AM PDT
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Well, no surprise there. According to an industry-backed labeling scheme, sugary cereals are "healthy."
A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation's largest food manufacturers, is "designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices."
The green checkmark label that is starting to show up on store shelves will appear on hundreds of packages, including - to the surprise of many nutritionists - sugar-laden cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops.
"These are horrible choices," said Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health.
He said the criteria used by the Smart Choices Program were seriously flawed, allowing less healthy products, like sweet cereals and heavily salted packaged meals, to win its seal of approval. "It's a blatant failure of this system and it makes it, I'm afraid, not credible," Mr. Willett said.
Companies who pay up to $100,000 per year to participate in this program include Kellogg's, Kraft Foods, ConAgra Foods, Unilever, General Mills, PepsiCo and Tyson Foods. The language used by the asshat junk food apologists in the NYT article quoted here is identical to similar, previous scams run by the food industry, where they tell you how to identify "better for you" choices among junky processed foods (as opposed to "fun for you" choices). I love the part in Michele Simon's book Appetite for Profit where she talks about the "better for you" labels, asking: Better than what? Starvation? Seriously.
Well, to be more specific, the aforementioned junk food apologist said in the article that the Froot Looops cereal with a Smart Choices checkmark on the box would be a better choice than doughnuts. That may be true. But somebody who is shopping for cereal is not comparing cereal to doughnuts. They are comparing it to other cereal. And it's not terribly difficult to locate a cereal that is "better for you" than Froot Loops. What about oatmeal for breakfast? Rolled outs are a fast-cooking, easy, minimally processed breakfast option that can be very tasty with raisins and a bit of brown sugar or maple syrup. Now THAT is a smart choice.
What I'm perhaps most disgusted about is the participation of Eileen T. Kennedy in this project. She's the president of the Smart Choices board... and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. I'm friendly with a number of Friedman School students, faculty, and graduates, and quite frankly, this is not something I would have expected from them. Big Food will always be Big Food, but they don't need to have academics and health experts lending credibility to their bullshit in this way.
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Fri Oct 03, 2008 at 22:05:40 PM PDT
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Consumer Reports analyzed a number of cereals marketed to kids to see how much added sugar they contained. The results were scary. Keep in mind that a 2000 calorie diet should have no more than 40g of added sugars (10 tsp).
Cheerios, Kix, Honey Nut Cheerios (all General Mills), and Life (Quaker Oats) earned points for relatively lower sugar and higher dietary fiber, the two categories we weighed as most important. Cheerios topped the list with only 1 gram of sugar and a healthful 3 grams of fiber per serving.
That's the good news. Here's the bad news:
There is at least as much sugar in a serving of Kellogg's Honey Smacks and 10 other rated cereals as there is in a glazed doughnut from Dunkin' Donuts. Two cereals, Kellogg's Honey Smacks and Post Golden Crisp, are more than 50 percent sugar (by weight) and nine are at least 40 percent sugar. And that's not the only issue. Although Kellogg's Rice Krispies has only 4 grams of sugar per serving, it got only a Fair rating, largely because it is higher in sodium and has zero dietary fiber.
The worse news? Who eats just one serving of cereal? If you fill up a large bowl with one of these sugary cereals, you could end up eating an entire CUP of sugar.
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