The 10 Worst Children’s Cereals

Posted By elissa on Dec 9, 2011 | 1 comment

The Environmental Working Group has a new report out: “Sugar in Children’s Cereals: Popular Brands Pack More Sugar Than Snack Cakes and Cookies.”

The title doesn’t leave much to the imagination, does it? Ditto the teaser on the cover: “Most parents say no to dessert for breakfast, but many children’s cereals have just as much sugar as a dessert – or more.” With that kind of lead, you almost don’t have to read the report!

According to the EWG, the worst offenders pack more sugar per cup of cereal than Twinkies or Chip’s Ahoy cookies.* The top 10 for sugar content (by weight) are:

1. Kellogg’s Honey Smacks (55.6%)
2. Post Golden Crisp (51.9%)
3. Kellogg’s Fruit Loops Marshmallow (48.3%)
4. Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch OOPS! All Berries (46.9%)
5. Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch Original (44.4%)
6. Quaker Oats Ohs! (44.4%)
7. Kellogg’s Smorz (43.3%)
8. Kellogg’s Apple Jacks (42.9%)
9. Quaker Oats Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries (42.3%)
10. Kellogg’s Froot Loops Original (41.4%)

According to the proposed guidelines from the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children, ready-to-eat cereals should contain no more than 26% sugar by weight.

The EWG report really doesn’t contain any surprises… unless you consider how little has changed through the years. Marketing sugary cereals to kids has been an issue for years… you’d think that – by now – something more substantive than a draft set of voluntary guidelines would be in place by now.

*In the interest of precision, 1 cup is somewhat more than the listed serving size on the sugary cereal labels I looked at. But the EWG’s point still holds, IMHO, since a) very few people actually measure cereal serving sizes; and b) they err on more, rather than less, due to the size of standard bowls.