Kellogg’s & Coco-pops

I picked up the main textbook “Examining Food & Nutrition” by Jenny Ridgwell (1996). The age of the book was bad enough, but I was then absolutely horrified to have the book open on a picture of Kellogg’s Coco-Pops – the very product against which the fabulous Children’s Food Campaign have been campaigning so passionately. I have also blogged on this in the past. Flicking to the very next page and almost half of this page was covered by a picture of Bran Flakes (see the scans of the pages below). (The Children’s Food Campaign have also done a brilliant expose of the way in which the food & drink industry are feeding junk messages to their next generation of consumers).

In disbelief, I turned to the inside cover to try to understand how this could be allowed. The companies thanked at the beginning of the book included: the Food & Drink Federation (members include every food & drink company in the UK that you can think of – Cadbury, Coca-cola, Kellogg’s, Mars, Pepsi, Unilever, United Biscuits – as examples, as well as more ‘federations’ like The sugar Bureau, The Federation of Bakers etc) and Sainsbury’s. Kellogg’s & Unilever are also especially singled out for thanks in the first paragraph. The second paragraph goes on to thank: The Federation of Bakers; The Co-op; Kellogg’s again; Lo Salt; Quorn makers Marlow Foods; National Dairy Council; Sainsbury’s again and Whole Earth. Most of the companies are thanked for allowing their product placement pictures to be used – what?! Kellogg’s should be thanking the publisher and a GCSE curriculum should not touch this blatant marketing to children in any circumstance.

A balanced diet

The books starts teaching our children nonsense as early as the first page of content. Under the heading “What is a balanced diet”? the entire text (literally – every single word under this heading – all that children apparently need to know about a balanced diet) reads as follows: “A balanced diet provides all the necessary nutrients in the appropriate proportions and quantities to meet our needs. One way to follow a balanced diet is to make sure we eat a variety of foods which supply a range of nutrients. Carbohydrates in the form of starchy foods such as bread, pasta, cereals and potatoes should be a major part of a balanced diet. We should also aim to eat at least five portions of fruit or vegetables each day.“

No mention of essential fats. No mention of essential proteins. The only macro nutrient singled out to form the “major part” of a ‘balanced diet’ is carbohydrates – ironically – the only macro nutrient that is not essential in any way. Get the bread, pasta, cereals and potatoes – things forming the major part of processed foods – mentioned on the first page. And why five a day? Why teach children things that have no evidence base and were started by fruit and veg companies as a marketing campaign? (In 1991) Does the book author even know this? Does she care?

On P10, we have the old (1994) “Balance of Good Health” plate, which has a prominent picture of puffed wheat cereal and breakfast flakes cereal – a quick glance and it passes for Bran Flakes no problem. We have the usual appalling array of processed food, which is still featured on the Eatbadly Plate - the September 2007 replacement for the BOGH plate. On the BOGH version of the plate in our children’s book, we have white bread, white rice, sugary baked beans, sugary yoghurt, crisps, lemonade, cake and man-made spreads (don’t put nature’s butter on view, whatever happens).

On P13 (scan below) we have a picture of Bran Flakes – beautifully positioned – full length all the way down the right hand side of the page. You can’t miss it. On p23 we have a tub of low fat spread and this fat-phobic section of the book stresses that we should choose (Unilever) low fat spreads and not (nature’s) butter.

There is one interesting fact that this section states correctly (I was surprised a) that they knew this and b) that they admitted it) “cholesterol in food has very little effect on blood cholesterol levels.” For “very little” read “none”. However, the text goes on to say “saturated fats from the food we eat are important factors which affect blood cholesterol levels.” This is the subject of significant debate, which the book should have known about even in 1996 when it was published, but all the more reason to have school textbooks as up to date as possible – particularly in an evolving topic, such as nutrition. (I would like the book to explain, biochemically, precisely how any real fat eaten in real food can raise cholesterol. I would also like the book to explain, given that cholesterol is only found in animal foods – meat, fish, eggs, dairy – and given that eating these has no impact on cholesterol in the blood – why are children/people told that these will raise cholesterol levels when we know that they don’t).

P26 & 27 are the  Unilever thank you pages – a double page spread of spreads. Ha ha. “Gold low fat spread” (I did say this was an out of date textbook); “Gold unsalted low fat spread” and “Gold lowest low fat spread.” There is then a table comparing two Unilever “Gold” products with a Waitrose spread and two from their rival St Ivel. Unilever win the calorie count (the focus of the table) by a mile. Go Unilever! (Butter was not in the table and the table did not measure natural levels of vitamins A and D, or butter would have cleaned up. Go away Nature!)

Then we have the p34 Coco-Pops and P36 Bran Flakes promotions to children. Because these foods have little to no natural nutrition, they are invariably fortified. The textbook fronts this off by saying “Some foods are fortified with vitamins which are manufactured. These are identical in structure to vitamins found naturally in food and behave in the body in the same way.” Really? You don’t need fat to accompany fat soluble vitamins any more? I’ve seen numerous studies showing that the whole food, with the accompanying macro nutrients, antioxidants and phyto nutrients,  is the best way to get vitamins. And what about minerals? Or essential proteins? Or essential fats? Do we not need these?

This is what our children are being taught – lies to position food industry products as nutritious equals to real food. Mother Nature doesn’t need to fortify her foods – they are naturally abundant in nutrients. If cereals have to add vitamins in to have any nutritional value, what does this say about them? They are high calorie, sugary vitamin tablets – that’s what.

On p45, all about dietary fibre, the first four products listed are not the products highest in dietary fibre, nor the products in alphabetical order, they are the cereals – All Bran, Weetabix, Porridge oats and cornflakes. Only one of those can come in a natural form – oats. Tomatoes, lentils and peas are at the bottom of the list.

P99 devotes just one side (less than the space devoted to Bran Flakes packets) to eggs and cannot find a good thing to say about them. Salmonella and cross contamination are mentioned and eggs are described as little more than things that bind ingredients together. This is part of the dual strategy of cereal manufacturers 1) promote one’s own sugary products and 2) denigrate what people used to eat for breakfast, so that your products become the preferred alternative. It is disgraceful for a GCSE textbook to be supporting this propaganda.

What caused the obesity epidemic?

I could go on turning the pages with misinformation after misinformation. No mention of the difference between retinol and carotene and the necessary, and not always possible, conversion to obtain vitamin A in the right form; margarine claimed to be a good source of vitamin D – not naturally it isn’t. That’s an even higher calorie vitamin tablet. No mention of vitamin K1 and K2, or the need to get both plant and animal forms of this vitamin. Vitamin E is declared as “deficiency rare.” Last time I looked at the UK Family Food Survey, the average Brit was getting barely the ridiculous UK Recommended Daily Allowance (we are apparently only ‘allowed’ a certain level of nutrition) and this, 10mg per day, is two thirds of the minimum USA ‘allowance’ – unless we need less of this vital antioxidant than our American friends? There is no mention that vitamin B12 is the unique nutrient that is only found in animal foods (hence why humans are not intended to be vegan). Instead, the textbook tells children that B12 is found in breakfast cereals – the high calorie vitamin tablets again. Not naturally it isn’t – again.

My favourite page is p173 where there is a highly revealing graph (the one on the right hand side of the page scan below), which tells us lots about the obesity epidemic, but the book doesn’t realise that it is sat on a gem. Rather amusingly, the text next to the graph says “The chart below shows how our eating habits are changing. We are slowly changing to a healthier diet.”

The graph then shows that, between the years of 1971 and 1991 (don’t forget how out of date this is) the index of breakfast cereal consumption has gone up from 100 to about 170; the index of white meat (think KFC) has gone up to approximately 175. The index of red meat (beef and veal – quality stuff) has gone down from 100 to approximately 60 and the index for eggs has more than halved from 100 to less than 50. So – having breakfast cereals for breakfast is apparently healthier than eggs. Just one thing – obesity for men was 2.7% in 1972 and 22.6% in 1999 and obesity for women was 2.7% in 1972 and 25.8% in 1999. So, during this time when our diet was ‘healthier’ – according to the companies funding our children’s text books – obesity multiplied almost ten fold, diabetes type 2 has reached almost epidemic levels and childhood obesity has become a household term.

WJEC Board

The WJEC specifications for teaching this Home Economics: Food & Nutrition GCSE include in their specification of tasks (p17):

Cereals make an important contribution to the diet.
(a) Investigate the role of cereals in the diet.
(b) Develop a range of ideas for dishes using cereals.
(c) Plan a course of action for making a selection of dishes using cereals.
(d) Make and present the selection of dishes.
(e) Evaluate your work.

I could understand if they wanted children to know about the super foods liver, eggs or spinach, but fortified cereals?

And finally, because the exam is what this is all about at the end of the day, take a look at this specimen exam: one mark for knowing that strawberry milk shake is higher in calcium than orange & mango juice and another point for knowing that the fruit juice is higher in vitamin C. Question 4 is all about how can we eat at least 4 slices of bread a day – that should fuel the Federation of Baker profits and childhood obesity nicely. Question 9 beggars belief – “Explain how the addition of modified starch is of benefit to the consumer.” Would I get any marks for saying – it is of no benefit to the consumer.  The chemically altered FrankenFood that is modified starch is of great benefit to the producer because it extends shelf life, it is cheap, it speeds up the thickening process (saves more costs) and it takes lumps out of things otherwise so hideous that people probably wouldn’t eat them.

Next time you’re at parents evening – start asking the teachers about how and what they are teaching, not how your little darling is performing. I hope that your little treasure skips nutrition class – better to learn nothing than to learn these appalling, conflicted messages.

How to get every word possible to tempt a dieter to eat stuff that they should be avoiding?! And, of course, as people who eat Special K are Queens of calorie counting, the 99 calories a bag is going to appeal.  99 calories of what, however? This is the full ingredients list from the Kellogg’s web site:

Cereals (Rice, Wheat Flour, Whole Oats, Wholewheat, Rice Flour), Sugar, Vegetable Oil, Chocolate (5%)(Sugar, Cocoa Mass, Cocoa Powder), Wheat Gluten, Glucose Syrup, Defatted Wheatgerm, Dried Skimmed Milk, Partially Inverted Sugar Syrup, Salt, Oat Fibre, Barley Malt Flavouring, Raising Agents (E500, E450a), Flavourings, Emulsifier (Soy Lecithin), Antioxidant (E320), Vitamin C, Niacin, Iron, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin (B2), Thiamin (B1), Folic Acid, Vitamin B12.

Ignore the vitamins added to give this product a false impression of containing nutrients and you have sugar in the form of sugar (twice), glucose syrup, partially inverted sugar syrup and the flavourings are no doubt sweet ones. Then you have wheat flour, whole wheat, wheat gluten and defatted wheat germ. Ever wondered how we end up eating more sugar and wheat than any other ingredients out there?!

- 100g of this product is 72g of carbohydrate and 414 calories.

- 100g of pork chop is 0g of carbohydrate and 123 calories!

- 100 of apple is 14g of carbohydrate and 52 calories.

- 100g of porridge oats (dry oats, no water) is 69g carbohydrate and 379 calories.

Even if you care about calories – there are far better ways to consume calories than to eat 100g of this frightening selection of ingredients.

I had an eating disorder once, so I know what it is like to binge and starve and be horrible to oneself. I truly believe that putting this product in your mouth is being horrible to yourself. Be nice to yourself and eat real food! Nature makes the healthiest food – not Kellogg’s.

1)  I subscribe to the Children’s Food Campaign newsletter and support their campaigns.

The CFC got a great article in The Independent, which can be seen here.

2) This was an extract from the Children’s Food Campaign January newsletter: “Ever thought of avoiding Coco Pops after school?”

“A new advertising campaign from Kelloggs, suggesting to children “ever thought of Coco Pops after school?” has been eliciting outrage from parents on forums such as Netmums and Twitter. We think it’s shocking that Kelloggs, who are partners of the Government’s Change4Life health campaign, are encouraging children to eat more sugary cereals (Coco Pops are 35% sugar) when one of the key messages of the Change4Life campaign is “sugar swaps”, encouraging families to swap snacks with added sugar for low sugar or sugar-free alternatives. If you’d like to complain, you can email Kelloggs at corporateresponsibility@kellogg.com. You might also like to copy the Department of Health into your email to make them aware of your concerns: dhmail@dh.gsi.gov.uk .”

3) So, of course, I emailed Kelloggs Corporate responsibility and the Department of Health as follows:

Dear Department of Health and Kellogg’s (30/1/2010)
I am writing to complain about the advert encouraging children to eat Coca Pops after school. It is bad enough that our young people start the day with a bowl of sugary cereal (coca pops being 34% sugar). It is even worse to think that children are being encouraged to have another bowl after school. We are fighting an obesity epidemic and any sugar (empty calories) either displaces other nutritional food, which adversely impacts health, or it is eaten on top of other nutritional needs, which adversely impacts weight. There is no room for sugar in a healthy diet – let alone this amount being pushed on parents and children alike as a fun thing to do with cartoon animation etc.
That Kellogg’s does this is not a surprise – it’s a private company looking to maximise brand profitability for shareholders. That the Department of Health has Kellogg’s as a Change for Life ‘partner’ is a disgrace. Department of Health – you lose all credibility as an advisor to UK citizens having such blatant affiliations with the food manufacturers.
I look forward to your response
Kind regards – Zoe Harcombe , Obesity researcher

4) You then get an auto reply from the Department of Health saying they will reply within 20 days,  but I did get a letter back from Kellogg’s on 3/2/2010 – fair do’s – pretty speedy. Here is the response (I’ve put in my comments along side each ‘defence’):

Dear Zoe

Re: COMPLAINT TO KELLOGG’s ABOUT COCO POPS ADVERTISING

I wanted to contact you following your recent email to Kellogg’s about us promoting our Coco Pops cereal as an after school snack.

The reason for recommending Kellogg’s Coco Pops with milk as an after-school snack is no different from recommending it for breakfast – it’s a nutritionally sound product that is suitable as part of a healthy balanced diet.

The fact is Kellogg’s Coco Pops is a low fat, low saturated fat food, containing just 175 calories per serving with semi-skimmed milk.  It provides 25% of the RDA (recommended daily allowance) for six B vitamins and 17% of the RDA for iron and calcium, as well as encouraging the consumption of milk which is normally eaten with our products.  In fact, 40% of milk consumed in Britain is with cereals. , and breakfast cereals are the leading source of iron in the diet of UK children . (Zoe comment: Coco Pops are low fat because they are a cereal and cereals are predominantly carbohydrate! Coco Pops have vitamins because they are ‘fortified ‘ because they would be nutritionally lacking if they weren’t and even more vitamins are added when people drink milk  – so give your child a glass of milk when they get home).

When it comes to sugar, one portion of Kellogg’s Coco Pops has just 10.5g – approximately two teaspoons.  To put this into context: a portion of fruit yoghurt contains 20g of sugar and toast and jam has 13g . (Zoe comment: sugary yoghurts and jam are also full of sugar  – this doesn’t make our product good, but we’ll compare it to other bad stuff to try to make it look good).

Breakfast cereals provide only 5% of the adult daily intake of added sugars in the diet – compared to 37% from drinks, 32% from sugar, preserves and confectionary and 14% from other cereal products such as cakes .  Breakfast cereals contribute 6% of the average daily intake of sugar in children yet up to 30% of some micronutrients such a B vitamins and iron. (Zoe comment: so let’s double the intake of sugar from cereals, by getting kids to eat them after school, as well as before school, as cereal manufacturers are missing out on their share of the ‘junk’ market. Check spelling of confectionEry also).

Sugar adds to the enjoyment of food with no detrimental effect to health – there is no scientific evidence showing a link between sugar and obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hyperactivity or cancer. (Zoe comment: I love this one! I didn’t actually suggest that sugar is behind the major killer diseases of the modern day, but, now you mention it… See Warburg, see Yudkin… what was my quote again? “If we have been eating food as nature intended for 24 hours then agriculture, which gave us large scale access to carbohydrates, started 4 minutes ago and our consumption of sugar has increased 20 fold in the past 5 seconds. I wonder which substance is more likely to be responsible for obesity, diabetes, or indeed any modern disease…”)

What I hope we can agree on is there’s an established link between excess calorie consumption and weight gain.  So – given the obesity challenge we all face – it seems prudent to compare the amount of calories in Kellogg’s Coco Pops and milk to many typical post school snacks. A serving of Kellogg’s Coco Pops with milk contains around 10% of a child’s calorie GDA, a suitable amount for a snack. A typical milk chocolate bar is 255 calories; a 4 finger chocolate and wafer bar is 213 calories and a bag of chewy fruit flavoured sweets is 222 calories. Kellogg’s Coco Pops with milk have noticeably fewer calories and less sugar then most of these options and provide many positive nutrients the other snacks do not. (Zoe comment: No. We can’t agree on this. I actually don’t care about calories – they are just fuel. I care about empty calories – sugar – which deliver fuel with no nutrition. This is what an obese society cannot afford to consume).

As a mum of two I understand the need for kids to have a quick snack when they got home hungry from school.  But, we don’t see any evidence that encouraging Kellogg’s Coco Pops as an after school snack prevents children from snacking on fruit. (Zoe comment: Are they eating both?! Not much room left for a good dinner eh?)

Independent research shows 90% of mums  give their children a snack after school, therefore we are not encouraging an eating occasion that would not normally happen.  The top six foods eaten being crisps, fruit, sweets, yoghurt, chocolate and biscuits.  Those who said that they would choose Kellogg’s Coco Pops with milk as an alternative said it would replace (in descending order) crisps, chocolate, sweets and biscuits – not fruit or yoghurt. (Zoe comment: So parents who give their kids junk now have another option. The parents that give fruit will still do so. This is the argument used by cigarette manufacturers – we don’t increase the size of the market – we just encourage people to swap brands).

Therefore, having Kellogg’s Coco Pops with milk as an after school snack does not discourage the selection of fresh fruit, and also encourages the consumption of milk and provides essential micronutrients – an accepted dietary recommendation.

It’s for these reasons we don’t see promoting Coco Pops as an after school snack as being counter to our involvement with Change4Life. (Zoe comment: see what else Kellogg’s sponsor below…)

I’d like to assure you that at Kellogg’s we ensure all of our marketing and advertising is rigorously reviewed so that it complies with the relevant CAP broadcast and non-broadcast advertising codes.  (Zoe comment: None of this matters much because we comply with the advertising standards code, so we can do what we want!) I’d also like to advise you the current Coco Pops outdoor advertising campaign comes to its natural end this Friday.

I appreciate dialogue via a letter isn’t always the most productive.  So, I or a member of my team of nutritionists would be more than happy to meet with you and discuss your concerns in person.

Yours sincerely

(Zoe: I’ve left out the name and contact numbers for privacy, but after the job title is “State Registered Dietitian”) (Zoe comment: why am I not surprised?! The Kellogg’s Senior Manager for nutrition is a dietitian. The head of the Sugar Bureau is a dietitian. The British Dietetic Association (BDA) is “delighted” (their word) to be ‘in bed with’ the sugar and flour organisations. Kellogg’s are the sponsors of the British Dietetic Association’s annual conference on obesity. The American Dietetic Association is sponsored by Mars, PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, Unilever, General Mills and Coco-Cola. The BDA won’t tell me their sponsors – can’t think why. And then the dietitian primary slogan is “Trust a dietitian to know about nutrition”. Not when every dietitian I have met defends sugar I won’t!)

Finally – check out the Children’s Food Campaign competition for a new Coco Pops slogan - great fun! x

First of all – try finding out what you’re supposed to be having on a daily basis – you’d better have some free time to do some research. This morning (16/12/09) I typed in “GDA calculator” into Google and:

- the top two sites that comes up are Kelloggs.co.uk. Good to know a sugary cereal company is top of the list to advise me on what I should be eating!

- The third option is  whatsinsideguide.com – that looks more official so I click on that one. The photos look very similar to those on the Kellogg’s site, so I look to see who runs the site and it’s the  “Food and Drink Federation on behalf of the UK food and drink manufacturing industry”. They have Google places 3 and 4. I’m not doing very well so far.

- 5th place is krafthealthyliving.co.uk (Kraft make Toblerone, Oreo cookies, Terry’s chocolate orange, Ritz crackers and many more delights that I surely should not be eating).

- Then Kellogg’s come back in and take 6th and 7th places.

- ehow.com manage to get 8th place – even on the Google page I can see a mention of Kellogg’s in this link, so I ignore that one also.

- 9th place is someone trying to flog me software (shareme.com or something). This is fair enough – you will need a computer programme to work out your GDA when the time comes!

- 10th place looks official (hoorah!). I click on gdalabel.org.uk – ORG no less – how government endorsed is that?! Well not at all actually. www.gdalabel.org is run by the food and drink federation and you can see on this link to the GDA calculator page the names of the companies keen to tell you how their products can be accommodated into the Guideline Daily Amounts: Coca-Cola; Kellogg’s; Kraft; McDonalds; Tesco and Unilever. (As two can play at this game, I’ve got www.theobesityepidemic.org so that I can offer some alternative, independent, obesity advice – not sponsored by any drug or food companies).

Harcombe Diet followers will know that I hate GDA’s even before I set out on this journey – I hate them even more after discovering this, this morning. Food manufacturers don’t fare well with The Harcombe Diet but they love GDA’s! They must also love dieticians like Nigel Denby who has even written a book about how on earth to work out your GDA’s (I have it in front of me and I still haven’t got a clue – all nonsense anyway). Food manufacturers love people having ‘a calorie allowance’ that they can ‘spend’ how they like – it drives humans down the route of getting the biggest bang for the buck and that will be a calorie counted processed cereal bar and calorie counted processed cereal and calorie counted processed biscuits and so on. Dieters rarely choose a salmon steak cooked in butter with green beans when they can have a 100 calorie muesli bar and a 100 calorie tube of long lasting sweets and a 100 calorie ‘treat’ dessert and two 50 calorie biscuits and so on. The biggest bang for the calorie buck always comes from carbs, as they are lower in calories than fats. But fats have no effect on insulin whatsoever and carbs have total impact on insulin and it is insulin, and not calories, that make us fat!

Anyway, back to trying to work out what GDA’s are.  I couldn’t easily see what all the GDAs are on the web site run by Nigel Denby (or in the book). I could however see all this info immediately on the Kellogg’s site. “GDA’s at a glance” – there it was. Let’s say I’m an average woman, I’m supposed to have 2000 calories a day, 70g of fat (only 20g of these 70g should be saturated fat, but there is nothing to say that all 70g can’t be transfats if I wanted!) I’m supposed to have 230g of carbohydrate (now do you see why food manufacturers love GDA’s?!) I’m supposed to have 90g of sugar (Kellogg’s are hardly going to distinguish between natural sugar in a carrot or in milk – they won’t mind if I have a bowl full of the white stuff in SpecialK). Finally I am to have 6g of salt and 24g of fibre. (I think it should say up to 6g of salt and up to 90g of sugar and at least 24g of fibre, but a lay person would not know that).

There are also RDA’s – Recommended Dietary Allowances (I got these from a different site), which I am also supposed to take in (* means adequate intake): vitamin A = 700 (µg); vitamin C = 75 (mg); vitamin D = 5* (µg); vitamin E = 15 (mg); vitamin K = 90* (µg); thiamin = 1.1 (mg); riboflavin = 1.1 (mg); niacin = 14 (mg); vitamin B6 = 1.3 (mg); foliate = 400i (µg); vitamin B12 = 2.4 (µg); pantothenic = 5* (mg); biotin = 30* (µg); choline = 425* (mg); calcium = 1,000* (mg); chromium = 25* (µg); copper = 900 (µg); fluoride = 3* (mg); iodine = 150 (µg); iron = 18 (mg); magnesium = 320 (mg); manganese = 1.8* (mg); molybdenum = 45 (µg); phosphorus = 700 (mg); selenium = 55 (µg); zinc = 8 (mg); potassium = 4.7* (g); sodium = 1.5* (g); chloride = 2.3* (g).

Now, dear readers, you had better be very, very good at maths, as you have to get all of these variables to come together on a daily food intake basis. All the carbs and fats and the ‘right’ fats and the sugars and the salt and the fibre and all the vitamins and minerals – all within your 2000 calories a day. Don’t forget, if you’re doing a calorie controlled diet or weight watchers, you’ll be on 1000-1200 calories a day so even more luck to you! (Where’s that software link?!)

As I buy real food, I wouldn’t know where to start. My bag of porridge oats from the health food shop has a tiny label with the price and 100% organic oats and that’s all I need to know. My fish from the fish van in Chepstow has no label on it. My fruit & veg, from the local pensioner who delivers a box to us each Wednesday, has no labels whatsoever. The meat from the butchers has no label. We don’t even have a record of the weight of whatever rib of beef or chops we’ve bought. My 85% chocolate has a label (excellent!) This tells me that when I eat 100g of it each day, I have an impressive 46g of fat and 28g of this is saturated. Good to know that cocoa is such a natural food! So that would be my day blown on 2/3 of a bar of dark chocolate. A bowl of Kellogg’s cereal and a few Kraft Ritz crackers and no doubt I’d get gold stars from the GDA devotees. This is little short of criminal given the state of the obesity epidemic.

Seriously – you can either try and work out your GDA’s and RDA’s and make Kellogg’s and Kraft’s day or you can just eat real food, as nature intends us to eat it, and make your day.

A “Which” Consumer survey found that a child’s lunchbox could contain as much sugar as 10 doughnuts. A packed lunch with 5 items including cheese, biscuits and fruit juice, contained 60g of sugar. This equates to 12 teaspoons making the lunch as sugary as 10 McDonald’s Sugar Donuts or nearly a pint of coca-cola.

One of the worst products was the Robinson’s Fruit Shoot Orange Juice with 23g of sugar per 200ml bottle.

The various offending companies had spokespeople put up a defence:

Robinsons said it makes a low sugar version and the labels contain clear information so that parents can make an informed choice.

Nestle said its Munch Bunch (low in fruit and 2 teaspoons of sugar in a small pot) was high in sugar and protein and its packaging was clearly labelled.

Kellog’s said its Frosties cereal bars are a low-fat alternative to chocolate.

Isn’t there legislation for crimes against children? Can there be any defence for putting company profits before the health of our children?

Regular readers of this blog will know I have little regard for parents who don’t give their children the most important thing they can give them – health. Being a great parent is not about being able to provide branded trainers, it’s about inspiring your offspring to be the best people they can be. They can’t even start to achieve in this increasingly demanding world, without basic health.

To send a child off to school without a decent breakfast inside them is negligent. On the other hand, this survey was commissioned by Kelloggs – no doubt looking to see if they can get the 30% of girls and 20% of boys, who don’t have breakfast at home, to have a bowl of sugary cereal instead. This is just as bad as sending the child out for the day with an empty stomach.

Great breakfasts for children are bacon and eggs, omelettes, whole meal toast and marmite (if they love it), fruit, natural yoghurt, and/or sugar free cereals like porridge/shredded wheat (there aren’t many). Frosties, Cornflakes and other sugary cereals are not the best start to the day.

The smoking bit came from the fact that many parents are giving children money to get breakfast on the way to school and some kids are getting cigarettes instead. If your child comes home smelling of ciggies, no more breakfast money!

Can you believe we spend more than £1bn on cereals each year? The consumer group, WHICH, found that 31 of the top 100 selling brands contain more than 4 teaspoons of sugar per recommended serving (which is usually some ridiculously small portion size). One of the Dorset cereals was 41% sugar. Frosties were recorded as 37% sugar; sugar puffs 35% sugar, Kellogg’s Special K is 23% sugar and Bran Flakes 22% sugar. Many years ago I phoned the Kellogg’s helpline and asked for the sugar content of All Bran. The answer given was 18% and I thought – for anything that tastes like straw to be 18% sugar – imagine how much sugar is in the sweet stuff. Now we know!

The best breakfast cereal has to be 100% porridge oats. Shredded wheat and bite sized shredded wheat are 100% whole wheat and are great products – just not so good for anyone with wheat intolerance.