Friday Favorites: Are Fortified Kids’ Breakfast Cereals Healthy or Just Candy?

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

Processed food companies spend a lot of effort trying to make their products seem healthier than they actually are. Does vitamin and mineral fortification make dayglow marshmallows healthy? Watch to find out.

In 1941, the American Medical Association’s Council on Foods and Nutrition was presented with a new product, Vi-Chocolin, a vitamin-fortified chocolate bar, “offered ostensibly as a…product of high nutritive value…but in reality, intended for promotion to the public as a [kind of] vitaminized candy.” Surely something like that couldn’t happen today! But that’s the entire sugary cereal industry’s business model. Twelve vitamins and minerals. Way better than those marshmallow Froot Loops with just a measly 11.

Nutrients are added to breakfast cereals “as a marketing gimmick to create an aura of healthfulness.” If those same nutrients were added to soda, would we feed our kids Coke for breakfast? We might as well spray cotton candy with vitamins too. As one medical journal editorial read, “Adding vitamins and minerals to sugary cereals…is worse than useless. The subtle message… is that it is safe to eat more.”

General Mills’ “Grow up strong with Big G kids’ cereals” ad campaign featured products like Lucky Charms, Trix, and Cocoa Puffs. That’s like the dairy industry promoting ice cream to get your calcium. Kids who eat presweetened breakfast cereals may get more than 20 percent of their daily calories from added sugar. Most sugar in the American diet comes from beverages like soda, but breakfast cereals represent the third-largest food source of added sugars in the diets of children and adolescents, wedged between candy and ice cream. On a per-serving basis, there is more added sugar in a cereal like Frosted Flakes than there is in frosted chocolate cake, brownies, or a frosted doughnut.

Kellogg and General Mills argue that breakfast cereals only contribute a “relatively small amount of sugar” to the diets of children; less than soda, for example. This is a perfect example of a psychological phenomenon known as “diffusion of responsibility.” That’s like every restaurant in the country arguing that their individual contribution to the problem of secondhand smoke is relatively tiny, and therefore should be exempted from a smoking ban. Each and every source of added sugar should be reduced.

The industry argues that most of their cereals have less than 10 grams of sugar per serving, but when Consumer Reports measured how much youngsters actually poured, they were found to serve themselves about 50 percent more than the suggested serving size for most of the tested cereals. The average portion of Frosted Flakes they poured for themselves contained 18 grams of sugar (4.5 teaspoons, or 6 sugar packets worth). It’s been estimated that “a child eating one serving per day of [the average children’s cereal] would consume [close to 10 pounds of sugar in a year], nearly 1,000 spoonfuls of sugar.”

General Mills offers the “Mary Poppins defense,” arguing that it’s those spoonfuls of sugar that can help the medicine go down, explaining that “if sugar is removed from bran cereal, it would have the consistency of sawdust.” If we couldn’t add sugar, our cereals would be unpalatable. If one has to add sugar to a product to make it edible, that should be a sign. That’s a characteristic of so-called “ultraprocessed” foods, where you have to pack them full of things like sugar, salt, and flavorings since they have had “their [natural] intrinsic flavors processed out…and [you have] to mask any [unpleasantries] in the final product.”

The president of the Cereal Institute has argued that without sugary cereals, kids might not eat breakfast at all, similar to dairy industry arguments that “removing chocolate milk from school cafeterias” would risk kids skipping lunch. He also stressed we must consider the alternatives. As Kellogg’s director of nutrition once put it: “I would suggest that Fruit [sic] Loops as a snack are much better than potato chips or a sweet roll.” You know there’s a problem when the only way to make your product look good is to compare it to Pringles and Cinnabon.

Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.

• Anderson GK. The addition of synthetic vitamins to confectionery. JAMA. 1945;127(6):331.
• Ludwig D, Wootan M. Sugary Cereal: Breakfast Candy or Obesity Cure?.
• Stanton RA. Changing eating patterns versus adding nutrients to processed foods. Med J Aust. 2016;204(11):398.
• Harris JL, Schwartz MB, Brownell KD, et al. Cereal FACTS 2012: limited progress in the nutrition quality and marketing of children’s cereals. Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. Published June 2012.
• Frary CD, Johnson RK, Wang MQ. Children and adolescents' choices of foods and beverages high in added sugars are associated with intakes of key nutrients and food groups. J Adolesc Health. 2004;34(1):56-63.
• O’Neil C, Zanovec M, Nicklas TA, Cho S. Presweetened and nonpresweetened ready-to-eat cereals at breakfast are associated with improved nutrient intake but not with increased body weight in children and adolescents: NHANES 1999–2001. Am J Lifestyle Med. 2012;6:63-74.
• Vos MB, Kaar JL, Welsh JA, et al. Added Sugars and Cardiovascular Disease Risk in Children: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association. Circulation. 2017;135(19):e1017-e1034.
• Erickson J, Slavin J. Total, added, and free sugars: are restrictive guidelines science-based or achievable?. Nutrients. 2015;7(4):2866-78.
• Clark C, Crockett SJ. Concern over ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. J Am Diet Assoc. 2008;108(10):1618-9.
• Schwartz MB, Vartanian LR, Wharton CR, Brownell KD. Authors' Response. J Acad Nutr Diet. 2008;108(10):1619-20.
• Council of Better Business Bureaus, Inc. 2016 Cereal Snapshot. Arlington, VA: CHILDREN’S FOOD AND BEVERAGE ADVERTISING INITIATIVE; 2016.
• Better Breakfasts? Some Cereals are More Than 50 Percent Sugar. Consumer Reports. 2008:16-17.
• Undurraga D, Naidenko O, Sharp R. Children’s cereals: sugar by the pound. Washington, DC: Environmental Working Group; 2014.
• Goldfein K, Slavin J. Why sugar is added to food: food science 101. Compr Rev Food Sci Food Saf. 2015;14(5):644-56.
• Scrinis G, Monteiro CA. Ultra-processed foods and the limits of product reformulation. Public Health Nutr. 2018;21(1):247-252.
• Hayden EB, Shannon IL, Brenner C, et al. Letters from our readers. J Dent Child. 1975:88-90.
• Hanks AS, Just DR, Wansink B. Chocolate milk consequences: a pilot study evaluating the consequences of banning chocolate milk in school cafeterias. PLoS ONE. 2014;9(4):e91022.
• Hearings before the select committee on nutrition and human needs of the United States Senate, Ninety-third Congress, first session. Nutrition Education—1973. Part 3—TV Advertising of Food to Children. Washington: US Govt Printing Office; 1973.
• General Mills. Re: Interagency Working Group On Food Marketed To Children: FTC Project No. P094513 Comments On Proposed Nutrition Principles And General Comments And Proposed Marketing Definitions. Washington, D.C. Published July 14, 2011.

Image credit: Etienne Girardet via unsplash. Image has been modified.

Motion graphics by Avocado Video