Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Nutrients Go Down?

There has been lots of hoopla lately about the sugar in breakfast cereals.

Kellogg recently announced that it would put an upper limit on sugar for cereals and all the foods it markets to children. General Mills announced some time ago that at least half the grain in all its cereals would be whole grain.

Breakfast cereal is also an object of heavy scrutiny by all manner of health experts and consumer watchdogs, and that's a good thing. Kids eat lots of breakfast cereal. They also drink lots of soda, but more about that later.

Anything kids eat a lot of should be healthful and nutritious, so let's take a closer look at just what sugar is doing in breakfast cereals in the first place.

Cereal 101

Most breakfast cereals are fortified with numerous essential vitamins and minerals. Not every single one you need, mind you, but a lot.

Have you ever tasted raw vitamins and minerals? They tend to taste bitter. Just suck on an iron pill and you'll get the picture.

To complicate matters, fortified cereal usually has amounts of nutrients not usually found in nature (Mother Nature doesn't usually put precisely "a third of 10 essential vitamins and minerals" into a single serving of a food). So how can you get around the bitter, often metallic taste of added nutrients? Cut it with a little salt and/or sugar.

Sugar was added to cereal, and kids (and adults) ate it up. A little more sugar got added, and they ate up more, and by now some cereals are a full 50 percent added sugar. It was getting so that kids are having some grain with their sugar … and enough already.

A saving grace of cereal, however, is that it's a "vehicle food." Cereal could be eaten alone, but it is most often eaten with milk and perhaps some fruit. Indeed, it can be a great way to get milk and fresh fruit into kids (and adults, too).

The question is how much is enough, and where should the boundary be drawn?

A single serving of most cereals (about an ounce, or 30 grams, on average) has about 110 calories. Add a cup of 1 percent milk and you have another 100 calories. Add one-half cup of fresh fruit and tack on another 60 calories, for a total of 270 calories and a nice, balanced meal in the morning that won't add to your waistline -- or that of your kids.