Photo by Clean Wal-Mart/Flickr CC
Kelly Brownell and his colleagues at the Rudd Center at Yale have produced another well researched--and in this case, gorgeously presented--report on the ways cereal companies market their products.
Even a quick look at its summary gives an unambiguous result: most of the marketing dollars are aimed at pushing sugary cereals at kids. Companies use TV and the Internet to push the least nutritious cereals.
None of this is particularly surprising but it's great to have the data. Information about marketing budgets for specific products is hard to get. It is easy to understand why companies would rather nobody knew how much they spent to get kids to pester their parents to buy Froot Loops or Cocoa Puffs.
Most troubling is the dual marketing. Advertising aimed at kids pushes sugar. Advertising aimed at parents uses health claims and self-endorsements like the late (and not lamented) Smart Choices program I discussed in previous posts.
Companies may argue that sugary cereals are good because they encourage kids to drink milk, but the Rudd Center researchers also have shown that kids are happy to eat non-sweetened cereals Furthermore, if they add their own sugar, they are putting in less than the cereal companies put in.
The bottom line: forget industry self-regulation. It doesn't work.
FDA: it's time to take on health claims.
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Even the presumably healthful, whole grain cereals show sugar as the second or third item in their ingredient declarations ( I'm looking at you, Cheerios and Wheaties ).
That doesn't necessarily mean anything. If I make a batch of bread dough, yeast will be third on the ingredients list, even though I used 6 cups of flour, three cups of water, and only a couple tablespoons of yeast.
Point being that there can be a huge drop off between ingredient #1 and #3, not necessarily that Cheerios are a nutritional paragon.
i think both of you make good points. i was shocked, also, that the brand rankings table on page 66 of the report rated mini-wheats as the "best" cereal. while they might have a higher NPI rating, they contain high fructose corn syrup and i would rather eat cereal containing more natural sugars than anything with hfcs in it. that might come down to personal preference, and with cereal companies and cereal in general it is difficult to find a win-win situation (good, affordable, tasty cereal with quality/"real" ingredients); while cereals lower in sugar content might be the first step in changing the way American children snack or start their days, we shouldn't lose sight of the goal of eating more minimally processed foods. as a former cereal addict, it's been hard for me to abstain from eating it, but now that i'm trying to stick to eating minimally processed packaged foods, that means that i've come to see cereal as more of a taboo treat than of breakfast.
The ingredient declaration relies on a chemical analysis of the end product, not on the amounts of ingredients as inputs. The ingredient declaration for bread will not show the water which disappears in baking. Check a bread label sometime.
The kid-focused advertising discussion has been around longer than the Kool-Aid man, of course they're going to play to what the kids crave: sugar and fun. Why is this so shocking? What about personal regulation? It still takes the actual buyer, the parent, to put the box in the cart. And yes, having four kids I understand the pressure they may exert, but they know who rules the roost, and it's not Tony the Tiger. As for dual marketing, all it takes is a little initiative to understand what you're buying. Those who care, will.