Garbage Cereal - Rant

If my mom is reading this, she'll get a good laugh because she knows just how much I love good old Golden Grahams cereal. As a kid, if I could have chosen to subsist solely from one "food" source it
would have been Golden Grahams cereal hands down!


Why? Well I was a kid for one, and even if you'd told me how bad that stuff is I wouldn't have cared. I mean, as a kid, you're invincible. And the idea of "nutritional value", just didn't exist to me as a kid.


Fortunately I've grown up... at least in that regard! LOL


My beef with the cereal companies is how they market their products. I was at the supermarket last week and I had the "lovely" experience of watching a kid pressure his mom into buying him four utterly garbage-filled cereals.


I am going from memory here, but they were:

1. Lucky Charms
2. Count Chocula
3. Cinnamon Toast Crunch
4. Fruity Cheerios


As a (relatively) educated adult, that list sounds like a dessert list to me. But this mother gave in to her sons pressure and bought them all. I actually had to pretend to be deciding between a couple other products on the opposite wall so I could stay and listen in to the whole fiasco.


The mother said she wasn't sure if the cereals were nutritious enough, and it was actually the boy who pointed out a number of marketing and labeling facts that eventually convinced the mother to buy them.


From my recollection, there was mention of:

1. "Low in fat"
2. "Whole grain"
3. "Fruit has vitamins&minerals"
4. "Heart Healthy"


The cereals chosen were all low in fat, but really, who cares? More than anyone else, kids need fats. Of course they need healthy fats, not the kind you WOULD see in cereals if fats were not so taboo these days.


Whole grain. This is about the biggest joke ever. Just because you start with a WHOLE grain, doesn't mean after pulverizing the hell out of it that there's much left of any nutritional value. That's actually the whole point of cereals. Take Cheerios for example. Made from Whole Oats. Wow.. that's great. But if you take 1/4 cup of actual oats, after all the processing that General Mills does to them you get a whole BOX of Cheerios. So the cereal companies are basically diluting the nutritional content of the WHOLE grains in their products.


Of course they have to fill it with something, so what do you suppose that would be?

JOKE INGREDIENT LIST

Check out the ingredients list of this Berry Burst Cheerios garbage cereal. Can you believe they have the gall to put a little heart right square in the middle of the page that says "May reduce the risk of heart disease".


Read the ingredients list and you tell me if you think this cereal "might" reduce your risk of heart disease, or flat-out CAUSE you to get heart disease!


Here's another one...


As if being filled with corn starch, corn syrup, and corn meal wasn't bad enough, they even use corn as their "WHOLE GRAIN" base from which to make the cereal. It's absolutely abominable!


IMPORTANT VIDEO

Check out these VIDEOS I found on the GENERAL MILLS GARBAGE CEREAL website. These videos are short--basically because there isn't much to say that takes longer than 3 seconds about their cereals when it comes to health--and are designed to make you feel confident that you're serving your family healthy foods. They have a registered dietitian speaking in effort to boost your confidence in the health of these products.


First of all, as a registered dietitian, talk about prostituting oneself out to the highest bidder. Technically, everything she says is correct. But it does nothing to change the fact that those cereals are nothing more than vitamin fortified desserts that "start" with a WHOLE grain base.


Have I not made it clear enough that GRAINS aren't the end all and be all of nutrition? Yes they have lots of fiber when you eat them in the form they grow in or with minimal processing, and they do have some vitamins and minerals, but grains' biggest component is starch. Like we need any more of that!


Check this out... good old Cheerios, which used to be the cereal my mom would buy us all the time because she said it was the healthiest, has now sold out to the sugar demons. How many different sugary Cheerios cereals are there now?

Cheerios Variety

There are ten varieties of Cheerios, and seven of them have an image of fruit on the front of the box. Of the seven that have an image of fruit:


- Regular Cheerios and MultiGrain Cheerios actually have no fruit in it at all


- Berry Burst Cheerios has freeze-dried fruit (near zero nutrition)


- Banana Nut Cheerios has banana puree in it (can you imagine what that looks like when it is poured out of the massive drum at the factory... it's gonna look and taste like a grey sludge... no yellow colour) another near-zero nutrition


- Apple Cinnamon Cheerios has apple puree concentrate in it, which did come from apples, but no longer bears any semblance at all to the original fruit (another near zero nutrition)


- Fruity Cheerios has pear puree concentrate in it, which is basically no different than apple puree concentrate, it's just a sugary liquid with trace vitamin and mineral content (another near zero nutrition)


- Yogurt Cheerios has dried strawberries in it, which I would like to think may be somehow better than the others, but I just know it's not (another near zero nutrition)


So as you can see the marketing practices of these companies try to present their cereals as healthful with fiber, fruit, vitamins and minerals, when in the end they deliver virtually nothing.


Don't get me wrong, I could enjoy a bowl of cereal, I do have a sweet tooth, but if I were to do so it would be a 10% meal, and truthfully, so long as Hagen Daaz exists, they'll be my 10% meals!


At least Hagen Daaz doesn't try to be "Healthy"!


As always I welcome and encourage your comments, both good or bad.