10 Cereals You Should Never Offer Your Kids
You wouldn't give your child junk food for breakfast, would you? Junk food like a twinkie, or a candy bar or a bag of Gummy Bears or Skittles? Bad nutrition, right?
Well, think twice about giving him or her shug, shug, sugary cereals like Kellogg's Honey Smacks which is at the top of the list of 10 unhealthiest cereals. The list created by the Environmental Working Group indicates that the apparently innocuous cereals your kids love are harmful in the amounts of sugar they yield. Why not just pour a bowl of sugar into some milk and give them that to eat. The effect is the same...just what is needed to "energize" them for nursery school, kindergarten or elementary school...a quick high followed by the sugar blues.
The Honey Smacks will rack up your kid's blood glucose levels faster than an airplane at take-off. Those honeys are a smack down at 56% sugar by weight. A one-cup serving of the brand loads more sugar than a Hostess Twinkie. And one cup of any of the other children’s cereals analyzed (44 kids' cereals) has more sugar than three Chips Ahoy! cookies.
It's ludicrous to think that by giving your kids cereal and milk you are doing them a favor. The healthier behavior would be to give them a twinkie or the three Chips Ahoy! But somehow, the perception because of advertising, is that cereals are grains and grains are fiber. Too bad that the only grains in kids' cereals are predominately crystallized, morphed grains of sugar.
OK. So you'll ween the kids off Honey Smacks and try something else. How about Post Golden Crisp? Bad choice. That's a sugary treat, more suited for a lumberjack or mountain climber who needs quick energy, not a kid who has to stay awake and learn in school. Mind you, one cup of Post Golden Crisp has 51.9% sugar by weight. In other words more than half of the content of the "cereal" is sugar.
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