Opinion: Murder by carbohydrates, US kids’ cereals are half sugar

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This is murder, but it’s murder by market culture. There’s no sinister intent in making kids’ cereals taste sweet. It was the way to make them eat the stuff, decades ago. It became a selling point, and that did the damage. However, the whole medical and nutritional profile of young kids has changed drastically since the 60s, and not for the better.

Reuters describes the indictment:

A serving of 11 popular cereals, including Kellogg's Honey Smacks, carries as much sugar as a glazed doughnut, the consumer group found.

And some brands have more sugar and sodium when formulated for the U.S. market than the same brands have when sold in other countries.

Post Golden Crisp made by Kraft Foods Inc and Kellogg's Honey Smacks are more than 50 percent sugar by weight, the group said, while nine brands are at least 40 percent sugar.

The most healthful brands are Cheerios with three grams of fiber per serving and one gram of sugar, Kix and Honey Nut Cheerios, all made by General Mills, and Life, made by Pepsico Inc's Quaker Oats unit.

This is not a new issue. People have now been screaming about high sugar levels for decades, particularly in kids’ food. Precious little has been done, and the solution couldn’t be simpler.

This problem needs to be understood, to understand the fix.

For adults, sugars are a nuisance, unless you’re diabetic. For kids, they’re just not food. Worse, they’re eaten without the sort of nutritional base required for growth and proper development. Sugars will help a kid put on weight, but not much else. Sugar itself is an energy supplement, not specifically a food, unless it’s raw sugar, which is much closer to real sugar cane.

Refined sugar, the sort used in cereals, is much worse. It’s pretty much “instant burn” energy, metabolizes very rapidly, and cranks up kids’ metabolisms when they really haven’t eaten much actual food.

Real food contains some sugars, but in forms which go much better with their needs for protein, calcium, and other essentials.

It’s like there’s plenty of gas in the tank. But the transmission’s all over the place, the wheels are partly deflated, and the engine barely manages to turn over when required to perform.

Hyperactive kids don’t need sugar, either. It makes a bad situation a lot worse. Sugar affects brain chemistry, notably affecting Vitamin B3, which is also called “brain sugar”. B3 aka niacin, is one of the most important of the whole B group, particularly in childhood. Sugar actively leaches it. Too much sugar, to someone whose mental chemistry is out of whack to start with, is no help.

Sugar is chemically hyperactive itself. Some sugar is an essential dietary element. “Blood sugar” isn’t just an expression. But in excess it’s a real nuisance. The refined sugars are low grade food at best, trash compared to the complex carbohydrates, and they add to the digestion an level of complexity most people don’t need.

If you’ve ever wondered why, after eating plain food, you suddenly feel a lot better, it’s because your dietary needs are actually being met, for once.

Human beings aren’t really designed to eat sugar in the modern way it’s supplied. In the original human diet, sugar was in the form of honey, or sometimes plant-based sugars, but more usually fruit sugars. Either way, it was a comparative rarity.

Sugar, therefore, was a luxury, and the human metabolism was designed to use it effectively. Oversupply means trouble, because the metabolism is still based on the miserly, sugar-poor, Stone Age diet.

Huge bursts of energy use up a lot of other important chemistry, notably electrolytes, and you wind up with a rundown, tired, person with no energy. It overloads the rest of the chemistry, which is deficient, usually, in important dietary needs, and makes the deficiencies worse.

Kids, who start off with a chemistry set provided by their mothers, are the original cave people, during the growing years. That’s the diet they need. Give them lots of unnecessary, high octane, garbage, and their body chemistry can be knocked around severely.

Originally, cereals were staples, plain food. They're basically seeds, and on their own, they're excellent food. Pre modern culture, you added sugar yourself. Interestingly, left to themselves, people tend to add less sugar. The phrase "sickly sweet" is universally understood. That’s not only better dietary practice, it means you can keep an eye on the sugar levels. If you want to get sneaky, you can add berries, particularly strawberries, and you’re providing some real, usable, food.

There's a further good result in that if you're eating real food, the effect of bad food is easier to handle. You have enough actual reserves of what you need to tolerate the sugars and other junk carbohydrates. You don't get run down so quickly. (Green veg are a good standby for diet improvement when you're feeling really low.)

Cereal manufacturers would find it cheaper, and that they’d get much less flak, by simply producing basic toasted grains. That’s much easier, lower production cost, it breaks down the carbohydrates a bit, and anyway, you can produce some really tasty stuff. Sugar could be reduced to a much lower volume, and salt added as a dietary balance on the sugars.

All the kids would need to do is get a bit inventive about sweeteners, and if they should accidentally happen to bump into some real food instead of refined sugars, wouldn’t that be awful?