Cereal

  We are big cereal eaters - so much so that when we renovated our kitchen I had a special shelf in my pantry planned just for all our various boxes of cereal!  Maybe it stems from childhood when my mother didn't want us opening more than one box at a time, but nowadays we have about 14 different kinds of ready-to-eat breakfast cereal ready to go.  Unfortunately for my nieces and nephew, they are all of the pretty healthy variety.  I saw a commercial for the leprechaun/tiger/vampire cereals the other day which they called "kid cereals" and it struck me how appalling it is to persuade the consumer that those are the cereals children are supposed to eat.  There is no reason to start a toddler on a "food" that is full of sugar and processed grain stripped of it's nutrients - (so stripped they then need to be re-fortified.  That doesn't make sense, does it?) and then try to "convert" them later in life when weight becomes an issue.  As with any packaged food, reading the nutrition label is the best start for picking the right food.  Pay attention to the grams of sugar and fat - you want to aim for a whole grain cereal with over 3 grams of fibre.  And of course, pay attention to the serving size shown on the box - that is the quantity used as the basis for the nutritional numbers: if you are eating over a cup of cereal (not hard to do) but the serving size is 2/3 of a cup, the calories, fat, sugar, and fibre are multiplied accordingly.

And another rule of mine resulting from childhood trauma: I will never mix the old remnants of one kind of cereal into a box of another kind.  Yuck!

Comments

[Chellie B]

*LOL* We almost had the same mom, it seems. We did buy the junkie cereals, which I shun like the plague now, but she foolishly let us pick the cereal based on the cool factor of the prize. Then, we had to save the prizes in a prize jar until there were enough for each kid to get one. And yes, we did mix old and new cereals just to get that next box opened and get us closer to our coveted prizes. Thank you, Kashi, for not putting my family through that. And thank you, me, for refusing to bring junk into the house.