365 Ways #123–Are you a Cereal Killer?

#123--The food of the school where I went to college was rated 3rd Worst in the Nation by USA Today. And after 3 1/2 years there, I couldn't do without my morning bowl. But the truth is that addiction started well before I was exposed to the culinary catastrophe of my college cafeteria. I was raised on Froot Loops and Lucky Charms and Cap'n Crunch. Our cupboard had more boxes than you see coming off a UPS truck.

It's not my mom's fault. She was a working parent trying to raise two children all by herself--and I can be a bit strong willed about what I will and won't eat (insert "duh!" here). Besides, the food manufacturers were targeting little kids with commercials on t.v. and ads in magazines, not to mention the cereal aisle which looked like a shrine to Tony the Tiger and Dig 'Em.

If only the information on this website had been widely known:

www.cerealfacts.org.

There you'll learn that the cereals we used to eat and the ones aimed at our kids today typically contain 85% more sugar and 65% less fiber than "adult" cereals. $156 MILLION dollars/year is spent to get your kid screaming "Trix is for Kids" and other similar sugar-driven cries for their a.m. dose of nutritionally void crap. And cereal, the "kid" kind or the "adult" kind, truly has no nutrition. The author of Beating the Food Giants, Paul Stitt, was a food scientist for one of the major food manufacturers. In his book, he writes about an experiment involving puffed wheat cereal and three groups of rats. The first group ate the cereal. The second group ate nothing. And the third group ate the BOX in which the cereal came. Guess which group died first--and then think about what you fed your children this morning.