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Breakfast Candy
Cereal, aka breakfast candy, aka love handle fertilizer (as Chris Shugart puts it), has to be one of the most over rated food sources in regards to health benefits.
Although most people will realise that adding less than 1% natural fruit juice to a Chupa Chup has really not made it nutritionally valuable, despite what the advertising says, cereal seems to be a product that no matter how full of sugar and how nutritionally deprived it is, people will still believe it’s a healthy food source.
It makes you wonder how something so un-healthy can be touted as a health food year after year, but really the answer is simple; it’s the advertising.
Back in 1863 the first cereal made its way onto store shelves, that cereal was Granola, which back then was very bland, some would claim it was barely even edible. However advertising told people it was good for the bowels and good for health and wellness and so it sold like crazy. Similar to the advertising of cigarettes; a product that is disgusting in taste, extremely bad for ones health and extremely addictive; even though this product had no positive benefits at all, the advertising approached the product as a way to become cool, sexy, strong and independent, and it worked; billions of people are addicted to cigarettes and the companies are sitting in their pools of cash laughing.
When it came to the advertising of cereal, not only did the advertising of bland Granola as a health food sell in the thousands, but it also lead the way to the creation of the many forms of cereal we now see today. One of the next generation of cereal brands to appear was called ‘Grape-Nuts’, which advertising claimed to cure appendicitis, improve IQ and “make red blood redder”. Although this form of advertising had no scientific proof supporting its health claims, in 1903 alone the sale of Grape-Nuts cereal reached over one million dollars.
By this stage the cereal industry was booming, and many new cereal manufactures appeared which caused advertisers to work overtime in order to secure sales and their dominance within the market. By 1936 cereal companies began to market towards children, and a flood of kid-friendly cereal boxes appeared, by 1960 90% of cereal advertiser’s budgets went towards selling cereal to children.
Cereal advertisers knew children didn’t care about their health; they only wanted what tasted good. In order to make cereal more palatable for children, companies began to overload the cereal with sugar; some brands of cereal contained up to 56% sugar.
Knowing fair well that the addition of sugar contradicted the initial ‘health’ movement of cereal, advertisers claimed that the sugar wasn’t in-fact bad for health, but rather was giving consumers (aka, children) fuel to begin the day. The sugar packed cereal marketed as “energy giving”, with colorful boxes and kid friendly cartoon characters/mascots made parents believe the cereal was in-fact still healthy for their children.
Most cereals today are packed full of sugar, but most people won’t look at the back of the box and see how much is actually added, or see what the nutritional value is like. One strawberry would contain more quality nutrition than a serve of any cereal on the market. If you really want to improve your health, stick with natural foods like those making up a paleolithic diet; nutrients, vitamins, protein, good fats and low GI carbohydrates are key for good health and should be found within every meal you consume.
Paleo Breakfast Recipes can be found in the Paleo Cookbooks