Not So Grrreat!
Cereal is the most popular breakfast choice today. However, the cereal aisle is a parent’s worst nightmare of bright colors and cartoon characters floating in a sea of sugar. Cereal boxes are littered with promises of health and nutrition; but these are just empty promises used to trick parents into believing they are feeding their children the right foods. Cereal companies use catchy tunes and slogans to grab the attention of young children. The children then proceed to beg and pester their parents until they get the cereal they want. Most parents strive to feed children nutritional foods but cereal companies have been making it harder and harder. Cereals that are marketed to children have little nutritional value and can lead to poor performance in school; this can be solved by marketing the nutritional cereals to children and parents removing unhealthy cereals from their children’s diets.
First, cereals marketed to children have little nutritional value. Cereal companies are required to self-regulate the nutritional value of their products, but this self-regulation only gives the cereal companies the right to fill cereal boxes with whatever they want. In an article by Georgina Gustin in December 2011, Jane Houlihan, vice president for research at the Environmental Working Group, states that cereals don’t belong in your breakfast pantry, they are desserts. Houlihan’s group assessed 84 cereals to make a report focusing on the larger cereal makers, the big four: General Mills, Kellogg’s, Quaker Oats, and Post Foods. The report was conducted to find out which cereals followed the nutritional guidelines set forth by the government: “What we found is that most children’s cereal fail these guidelines and the top reason is they have so much sugar,” stated Houlihan. Houlihan’s group has given the cereal companies some suggestions to change the