The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that some 75 million Americans now suffer from metabolic syndrome as a consequence of excess sugar in their diets. The organization believes that what smoking cigarettes is to lung cancer, sugar is to diabetes. Without sugar in our diets, diabetes might be an exceedingly rare disease—as it appears once to have been.
Would you give your child a glass of wine or a shot of brandy to start his day? Of course, you wouldn’t! But if your feeding you child Pop Tarts, energy bars or sweetened cereals like Frosted Flakes or Captain Crunch, by loading up your youngster with a sugar-enhanced meal to start the day, you might as well just pop the cork on a bottle Merlot in the morning and pour it into your son or daughter’s glass.
There’s a reason why the World Health Organization (WHO) advises on the upper limits of sugar consumption because dietary sugar eats away your kids’ liver and brain the same way alcohol does.
Back in the day, breakfast cereals were designed as a healthy morning start-up that aided digestion. But once Post introduced Sugar Crisp in the late 1940s— it was clear that added sugar equaled increased profits and by the 1960s, children’s breakfast cereal had been transformed into camouflaged desserts: seemingly nutritious but actually insidious.
If you are wondering how much sugar is in an average serving of cereal, you might be surprised to hear that there is a whopping 12g added to your bowl. In 2011 the US, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) identified 17 brands of breakfast cereals that are marketed at children in which 50 percent of the calories were made of added sugar. Even more alarming there were another 177 cereal brands with 40 percent of the calories occurring because of added sugar. Despite the alarm bells signaled by the EWG, three years later not one of the 17 brands of cereal identified by the organization with high quantities of sugar reduced the amount of sugar in their brands.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that some 75 million Americans now suffer from metabolic syndrome as a consequence of excess sugar in their diets. The organization believes that what smoking cigarettes is to lung cancer, sugar is to diabetes. Without sugar in our diets, diabetes might be an exceedingly rare disease—as it appears once to have been.
So do your children a favor and monitor their sugar intake. Help them to avoid the addictive nature of the sweetener, by curbing the amount they are allowed to consume.
