Twinkies and Skittles for Breakfast? The Cereals that Damage Kids, Adults

Eating most U.S. cereals for breakfast is akin to eating a heaping bowl of pure sugar. Or a pile of candy bars and Twinkies. 

Just as Big Food corporations planned, U.S. breakfast cereals are designed to hook you as customer-for-life via addiction to a super-sweet, sugary surge to start your day...

Americans now consume 22 teaspoons of sugar a day, on average, added to processed foods. Breakfast cereals are among the highest sources of added sugar in our daily diet.  

Sugar-saturated, carb-heavy, chemical-drenched breakfast cereals take a poisonous toll on personal health, especially that of children. 

Physical health and fitness, dental health, even mental health and focus in both children and adults are proven conclusively to be damaged by high daily doses of sugar.

Yet Big Food corporations aggressively market breakfast cereals, especially to to young children, in greedy hopes of hooking them, too.  Consider these facts: 

• 181 cereals are directly marketed in the U.S. to kids.
• Kids' cereals with cartoon characters are among the most highly sweetened of all
• On average, sugar is 34% of calories in cereals marketed to U.S. children
• Sugar is more than 50% of calories in many cereals aimed at kids. 
• More than 60 percent of children’s cereals contain a spoonful or more of sugar in every three spoonfuls of cereal. 
• (Source - "Children's Cereals: Sugar by the Pound," a research project by the Environmental Working Group) 

Anyone eating a typical serving of kids' cereals would consume more than 10 pounds of sugar just from their breakfast bowls each year.  Cereals marketed to kids have 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fiber and 60 percent more sodium than those aimed at adults. 

A box of Kellogg's Sugar Smacks is more than 56% sugar, by weight. Incredibly, a box of one store brand, Lieber's Cocoa Frosted Flakes, tested as 88% sugar.  

Don't depend on the FDA  to protect Americans with warning labels that ultra-sugary breakfast cereals are dangerous to your health.  In the 21st century, federal agencies fiercely protect Big Food corporations over public interest.  

Here's my question:  If you wouldn't eat a heap of Hostess snacks... Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, Sno Balls, Zingers and Honeybuns... for breakfast, why would you eat a brimming bowl of sugary breakfast cereal?

If you wouldn't serve to your kids a mound of Butter Fingers, Skittles, Milky Ways, Hot Tamales and Sour Patch Kids for breakfast, why would you give them a generous helping of cereal loaded with sugar, carbs, fillers, chemicals, and artificial colors and flavors?

Can't your kids depend on you to guard their health and welfare by feeding them nutritiously, rather than carelessly? 

Stop eating and serving sugar for breakfast.  You'll feel better and likely live longer, and so will your kids.  

And as a bonus, you'll thwart Big Food corporations from targeting and harming you, your loved ones and all Americans for the sake of profits. 

Related Reading

Lucky Charms: Poster Child for Industrial Junk Food? Fat Profits, Fat Kids

"Salt Sugar Fat" - Stunning Big Food Tactics to Hook, Trick, Harm Americans

Soy Sauce Fakes: How to Avoid Industrial Corn-Syrup Soy Sauce

Those little packets of soy sauce with take-out Chinese fare? Not really soy sauce at all. Rarely contains even a drop of soy. Think 100% fake soy sauce.

Same for many soy sauces sold in U.S. grocery stores: fake, or with only traces of soy bean extract.

Genuine soy sauce is based on an ancient Japanese process of brewing wheat, soybeans, and a certain mold, then allowing the culture to ferment for months before refining and bottling.  

The Japanese government has long been incensed by proliferation of imitation soy sauces, particularly by U.S. corporations. Japan has unsuccessfully pushed the United Nations food standards program to set an official international standard for soy sauce... a move that would mandate all imitations to be labeled as fakes, or as something else. 

Fake soy sauces take only three days to manufacture, as opposed to three months of brewing and maturing, and, of course, are concocted from far cheaper ingredients which typically include:

• Hydrolyzed vegetable protein (in lieu of soybeans)
• Corn syrup or another cheap sugar
• Salt
• Chemical "flavor enhancers"
• Artificial coloring

Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is...

"...  produced by boiling cereals or legumes, such as soy, corn, or wheat, in hydrochloric acid and then neutralizing the solution with sodium hydroxide. The acid hydrolyzes, or breaks down, the protein in vegetables into their component amino acids. The resulting dark coloured liquid contains, among other amino acids, glutamic acid, which imparts an umami flavor...

"Because of the high levels of glutamate in hydrolyzed vegetable protein, people sensitive to MSG should avoid hydrolyzed vegetable protein."  (Source - Wikipedia) 

In rare, and horrifying, instances, Chinese workshops use human hair as a source for soy sauce proteins. 

"China Central Television (CCTV), the state television station, first raised public worries over the quality of domestic soy sauce by uncovering a substandard workshop in central China's Hubei Province, where piles of waste human hair were found. The hairs were treated in special containers to distill amino acid, the most common substance contained in soybean sauce.

"Human hair is rich in protein content, just like soybean, wheat and bran, the conventional and legally accepted raw ingredients for the production of soy sauce." (Source - Boing Boing, May 26, 2004)

So what's a Chinese takeout aficionado to do in 2013 ?
So what's a Chinese takeout aficionado to do in 2013 when hankering for soy sauce with his/her pork fried rice, fresh wontons, and scrumptious eggrolls? 

The Rise and Sad Demise of an Iconic American Product: Killing Knott's Berry Farm Foods

Walter Knott's freshly picked berries... blackberries, strawberries, red raspberries, loganberries, especially his extra-sweet Macatawa blackberries... were favorites of my Great Aunts Gertrude (1885 - 1962) and Clara (1888 - 1975).  

On sunny Saturdays in the early 1920s, they and husbands Gordon and Victor would drive a Model T Ford down eleven miles of dusty roads south from their Whittier homes to Walter and Cordelia Knott's roadside berry stand in Orange County, California.  Sunday suppers by the Kansas-born sisters featured homemade preserves and pies vivid with flavors of Knott's berries. 

By 1927, the industrious Knott farm employed up to 50 seasonal pickers, and often yielded four crop rotations a year for berries, cherry rhubarb, and asparagus.  

And Walter had finally persuaded Cordelia to set-up batches of her popular, pure berry jams, jellies, and preserves to sell at the berry stand.  Gertrude and Clara, who were busy mothers, housewives, and yearned for travel adventures by car, rarely again made homemade preserves.  

The rest is Southern California history:

"Knott's great berries were a 'must stop and buy some' for both old friends and for travelers and tourists who had heard the good news by word of mouth...

"The big Depression hit then, in 1928,  but the Knotts responded positively by using the last of their savings to build the Farm's first permanent building--- a combined berry market,  a small mursery to sell berry plants, and a five-table Tea Room where Cordelia served sandwiches, hot biscuits with berry jam, and berry pie."  (Source - Knott's Berry Farm Cookbook, 1976)

By 1934, the Tea Room expanded to a 40-seat diner serving fried chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans, plus hot biscuits, berry jams, and berry pies.  Three years later,  Mrs. Knott's Chicken Dinner Restaurant opened doors with 300-seats and long waiting lines. Today, the famed restaurant draws more than 1.1 million customers a year. 

Cordelia's jams, jellies, preserves, and her new boysenberry ice cream and pancake syrup became legend, drawing locals and tourists eager to taste and tote home Knott's berry delights. Selling fresh berries fell by the wayside as crowds swelled for Cordelia's fried chicken and country ham dinners.  

Walter built small amusements to entertain customers while they waited hours to dine: first a rock garden and a replica of George Washington's fireplace, followed by a gift shop and an old Wells Fargo stagecoach. By the 1940s, Walter Knott embarked on rebuilding an American West ghost town, replete with relics from the California Gold Rush.

The end result, of course, was Knott's Berry Farm, today a famed 160-acre amusement park with 3.6 million visitors in 2011, and owned by New York Stock Exchange-listed Cedar Fair Entertainment Company.

A Business Built on Real Foods

Knott's, though, was built first on Walter's premium berries, and then on Cordelia Knott's extraordinary jams, jellies, and preserves made simply with the finest ingredients.  After Walter Knott innovated a new berry in the 1930s, the boysenberry, buyers returned in droves to try the unique fruit.

At every meal, my two great aunts, particular midwest-style cooks, always set on the table a pretty jelly dish or two of Knott's boysenberry, red raspberry, blackberry, or strawberry jam alongside a heaping plate of homebaked bread or hot biscuits.  

One of my earliest childhood memories is of savoring the tangy, sweet tastes of delicious Knott's jams at the elegantly-set Sunday supper tables in the Whittier cottage-homes of Great Aunts Gertrude Bennett and Clara Hodgin. (Yes, they knew the Nixon family. Never thought much of the Nixon kids.) 

 As the Knott's Berry Farm franchise grew over decades, gift packs of Knott's top-quality jams and jellies were commonly given to family, friends, and even as company gifts to employees. Knott's products were special, and considered special occasion, gourmet treats. 

Killing Cordelia Knott's Homespun Preserves

But as of 2013, Knott's superb products are no more. Killed by industrial food mega-corporations, hungry to cheapen and undercut great American products for greater profitability. 

Big Food corporate fake-food giant Con Agra bought-out Knott's food products and operations in 1995, pledging to foster the high-quality and good reputation of Knott's Berry Farm foods that had pleased generations of Americans. 

In 2008, though, Con Agra closed Knott's artisan jelly-making plant here in my hometown, and sold Knott's food brands to Ohio-based food giant J.M. Smuckers Co., industrial food corporate owner of Pillsbury, Hungry Jack, Dunkin' Donuts, Jif peanut butter, Crisco shortening, and hundreds of other processed food brands.  

In early 2013, Smuckers announced that Knott's-labeled preserves, jams, and jellies had been discontinued (except for token offerings at the Buena Park theme park).  That all Knott's jams, jellies, preserves and related products would bear the name of Smuckers...  a move that seems logical, considering that the high-quality ingredients and artisan-attention Cordelia Knott lavished on her pure, homespun fare had long since been compromised in favor of fake food sweeteners, additives, and processes.

Today, the ingredients listed for Smuckers Boysenberry Preserves, after boysenberries, are:

• High fructose corn syrup
• Corn syrup
• Fruit pectin
• Citric acid

Great Aunts Gertrude and Clara would be appalled. At their Sunday supper table, they would never have stooped to serve these inferior tasting, processed-food substitutes for Cordelia Knott's fresh, crisp iconic American creations.

In honor of their family tradition of delicious, healthy meals made with fresh, high-quality food, I won't either. 

(Great Aunt Clara is on the far right. Great Aunt Gertrude is standing center, back row. My maternal grandmother, Marie, their younger sister, is standing between my great grandparents. Photo was taken about 1900.)

Gaudy New Frito-Lay Chips Embody Wrongs of U.S. Industrial Foods

Three gaudy new Lay's potato chip shock-and-awe flavors embody all that's destructive and wrong and seductively delicious about U.S. industrial foods. 

Frito-Lay, Inc. is betting millions that these taste-exploding snacks will be the next red-hot must-buy in grocery markets, convenience stores, and gas stations nationwide.  If U.S. culinary history since the 1950s is any guide, Frito-Lay is likely correct.  

These chips, the brash embodiment of fake food in all its tasteless glory, would be an addictive party-and-a-half for junk food aficionados.  I should know... I sampled all three flavors after my son picked-up giveaways pushed this past weekend at a major supermarket chain.  (Click here for Lay's "Vote to Save Your Fave" contest at Facebook.) 

In extraordinary new bestseller "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us"Pulitzer Prize journalist Michael Moss writes of two corporate suppliers of key ingredients to American junk-food manufacturers:

"These were no run-of-the-mill ingredients... These were the three pillars of processed foods, the creators of crave, and each of the CEOS needed them in huge quantities to turn their products into hits. These were also the ingredients  that, more than any other, were directly responsible for the obesity epidemic.  Together, the two suppliers had...

• the salt, which was processed in dozens of ways to maximize the jolt that taste buds would feel with the very first bite;

•  they had the fats, which delivered the biggest loads of calories and worked more subtly in inducing people to overeat;

•  and they had the sugar, whose raw power in exciting the brain made it perhaps the most formidable ingredient of all, dictating the formulations of products from one side of the grocery to the other."

Author Moss recounts in lurid, well-documented detail how Kraft, Nestle, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Mars, and other industrial food corporations used tobacco industry marketing tactics to addict Americans to radically unhealthy foods laden with salt, fat, and sugar.   

Moss also describes the extreme addiction of industrial food corporations to rich, near-endless profits reaped by junk foods that are making Americans fat and sick... and how the U.S. government is too cozy with industrial food executives and lobbyists to stop the sickening of America. 

Notes the New York Times review of this book:

"Virtually everything you can buy in a supermarket that’s not an outer-aisle pure food like milk or kohlrabi has been fiddled with to make you shiver with bliss — which will in turn make you buy the product again and again."

I'm awestruck by the shameless, in-your-face brass of Frito-Lay in testing and releasing these three grotesquely over-the-top junk foods in the face of First Lady Michelle Obama's courageous three-year campaign to urge American children to eat more veggies and fruits, and less unhealthy fare.   

Yes, I'm awestruck at the corporate gall of unleashing these aggressively unhealthy snacks. 

But I'm also quite awestruck by the absolutely awesome taste of Lay's Chicken & Waffles flavored potato chips.  (I confess: see my empty bag, at right!)

Therein lies the deadly diet dilemma for us and our children and grandchildren. For the very vitality of our nation. 

Something needs to be done. Something needs to change. 

My suggestion? Make better food choices. Don't buy these scrumptious snacks that are intentionally designed to hook you and yours into a deadly, delicious cigarette-like habit. Just say NO.