Heaps of Sweets for the Little Ones | Analysis & Solutions

One Sweet Life.

Something that was brought to my attention recently, yes it has been a subject of conversation for years, is the large amount of sugar present in children's cereals. Why have cereal, oatmeal, and granola companies not changed their formulas to reduce the sugar load?

And the problem is not just the amount of a particular source of sucrose or fructose. Indeed, often there are combinations of sweeteners present in the ingredient mix. This is most egregious when most, or all, of the other ingredients are sugars.

Four Ingredients; Three of Them: Sugars

What I present above is the back of the golden puffs cereal box sold at Lidl. These are the perks of the cereal inside as highlighted on the official website:

• No high fructose corn syrup

• No artificial flavors

• No certified synthetic colors

Hilariously, the main plus is that the cereal lacks high fructose corn syrup. The back of the box shows that this assertion is not cause for celebration. If you are not familiar with glucose syrup, the simple explanation for it is a combination of maltose (malt-sugar produced in plant growth), dextrose (corn or wheat-based), and polysaccharides obtained through hydrolysis (water breaking the chemical bonds of starches). If all of these sugars are needed to make the product taste good, not only is it not worth eating, but it should also be reimagined entirely. Puffed wheat can be a healthy meal to start the day. The process requires wheat berries and high-temperature steam. For the non-celiacs out there, this can be an excellent addition to your diet and if you want to sweeten it, just go for a bit of maple syrup/sugar or stevia leaf powder (buy the powdered leaves instead of the white powder as the latter often contains erythritol or dextrose which are unnecessary sugar additives which completely undermine the use of stevia in the first place). SweetLeaf is a great brand of stevia to consider. It only adds inulin (a plant-based prebiotic) and silica to the main ingredient.

According to this article, men and women should try to limit their daily sugar intake to thirty-six and twenty-five grams respectively. As you can see from this picture, the added sugars in a single cup of this cereal contributes a third of a man's recommended daily allowance of sugar and slightly over half of a woman's. Obviously, the still-developing body of a child would receive too much sugar from one serving of this cereal. Almost half of their recommended sugar intake is present as added sugars in just one cup.

Now take a look at this cereal:

Cookies for Breakfast? Not a Great Idea.

Without the added sugars, this cereal only has one gram of sugar. Ninety percent of the sugar in one serving originates from sweeteners.

Lidl's website highlights the following benefits:

• Made with real cocoa

• Fairtrade Cocoa Program Certified

• No high fructose corn syrup

• No artificial flavors

• No certified synthetic colors

However, it still contains three different sources gram of sugar. The chocolate is unlikely to provide any nutritional benefit as it is certainly too low of a grade, below 70%, to be beneficial to the body and the sugar used to make the cereal palatable totally negates any health points gained from it. I am not sure why the manufacturers added processed sugar and glucose syrup when brown sugar (often toted as the healthier version of cooking sugar because of the small amount of minerals present in the molasses) syrup is also present in the mix. Again, if they were unsure of the palatability of their recipe, they should have remade it to make people want to eat it. You could have something similar to this by coating wheat berries (or oats or buckwheat groats for the gluten-free crowd) with cocoa butter, mixing them with cocoa nibs and half a teaspoon of stevia powder, cooking them, and eating them with milk of some sort. Four ingredients and all of them are healthy.

Speaking of healthy:

I often find myself looking for a decent bag of granola because I dislike the processing that happens to even proportedly "healthy" cereals such as Honey Nut Cheerios (which are often heavily fortified, and the heart healthy benefits gained from the oats can also be gained from oatmeal or a granola) and Honey Bunches of Oats (which includes unnecessary sweeteners, artificial flavors, and unhealthy preservatives). With the amount of added vitamins and minerals in common cereals, you might as well be spooning supplement pills out of milk and into your mouth. This is another benefit to granola because most of the ingredients are naturally derived. However, something that I cannot stand is when granola has added sugars. Take the product in the picture for example. Of the seventeen grams of sugar, sixteen of them are from additional sweeteners. This is especially annoying because fruit pieces are included in the mix! Fruits naturally contain fructose. All the sweetness should come from them. A quick way to sweeten plain oats is to add raisins to them. In summary, cane sugar, honey, and palm oil were all needlessly added to this product. They ruin the health punch that the granola could have had.

For clarity sake, here are the ingredients lists of Almond Honey Bunches of Oats and Honey Nut Cherrios I referenced earlier:

Real Healthy, right?

The Big YUM!

Ignore the cute, funny animals on the front of the box. What is inside of the packaging is not worth consuming. Start your children early. If you do not have much money to spend, buy the raw ingredients and put them in milk. Do not award these companies with money. All they do is give you more reasons to visit your doctor regularly. They keep propping up these boxed crimes by disclosing the lack of certain problem ingredients and the inclusion of certain superfoods and/or nutritionist and dietitian-approved ingredients to distract you from the bad ingredients present in the mixture. Literally, do not buy into the lies.