Breakfast Cereals For Children Are A Lot Of Sugar

Breakfast Cereals For Children Are A Lot Of Sugar.
Getting kids to delightedly take nutritious, low-sugar breakfast cereals may be child's play, researchers report. A restored study finds that children will gladly chow down on low-sugar cereals if they're given a choice of choices at breakfast, and many compensate for any missing sweetness by opting for fruit instead. The 5-to-12-year-olds in the reading still ate about the same amount of calories regardless of whether they were allowed to settle upon from cereals high in sugar or a low-sugar selection.

However, the kids weren't inherently opposed to healthier cereals, the researchers found. "Don't be appalled that your child is going to refuse to eat breakfast. The kids will put it," said study co-author Marlene B Schwartz, surrogate director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.

Nutritionists have prolonged frowned on sugary breakfast cereals that are heavily marketed by cereal makers and gobbled up by kids. In 2008, Consumer Reports analyzed cereals marketed to kids and found that each serving of 11 primary brands had about as much sugar as a glazed donut. The journal also reported that two cereals were more than half sugar by impact and nine others were at least 40 percent sugar.

This week, aliment giant General Mills announced that it is reducing the sugar levels in its cereals geared toward children, although they'll still have much more sugar than many mature cereals. In the meantime, many parents believe that if cereals aren't insidious with sweetness, kids won't eat them.

But is that true? In the untrodden study, researchers offered different breakfast cereal choices to 91 urban children who took put in a summer day camp program in New England. Most were from minorities families and about 60 percent were Spanish-speaking.

Of the kids, 46 were allowed to pick from one of three high-sugar cereals: Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Pebbles, which all have 11-12 grams of sugar per serving. The other 45 chose from three cereals that were stoop in sugar: Cheerios, Rice Krispies and Kellogg's Corn Flakes. They all have 1-4 grams of sugar per serving.

All the kids were also able to select from low-fat milk, orange juice, bananas, strawberries and notably sugar. The haunt findings appear in the January arise of Pediatrics. Taste did matter to kids, but when given a exquisite between the three low-sugar cereals, 90 percent "found a cereal that they liked or loved," the authors report.

In fact, "the children were impeccably happy in both groups," Schwartz said. "It wasn't liking for those in the low-sugar group said they liked the cereal less than the other ones". The kids in both groups also took in about the same total of calories at breakfast.

But the children in the high-sugar group filled up on more cereal and consumed almost twice as much gentle sugar as did the others. They also drank less orange liquid and ate less fruit. Len Marquart, an associate professor of food science and nutrition at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, said the look findings "confirm for people that their choices in the cereal aisle do order a difference".

So "The biggest challenges are taste and marketing. In the morning, kids are dull and cranky, and it's hard to get them to sit down and eat breakfast," he said. "The sugar cereals marketed with exhibition and color and cartoon characters help get kids to the kitchen tableland when nothing else seems to work. And, we have to be realistic, they do like the taste of presweetened cereals". But one working is to be creative, he said skin care books. "Take Cheerios and put some strawberries and vanilla yogurt on top, and that's wealthy to taste better than any presweetened cereal anyway," Marquart said.