Forget the vitamins -- eat your cereal

Kellog's has recently ramped up its nutritional claims on Rice Krispies (the original and -- though I had never before heard of these -- Cocoa Krispies and Jumbo Krispies). In words larger than the name of the product, the box promises that the cereal will now support your child's immunity by providing 25% of daily antioxidants and nutrients -- notably vitamins A, B6, B12, C and E. Interesting, cereal was really the first mainstream "health food". Cereal companies were mostly started by strange nutritional "pioneers" like Dr. Kellog, and began by marketing forms of pulverized wheat and other styles of "granula" later dubbed granola. Cereal companies were the first to realize the marketing power of adding health claims by convinving the American Heart Association to certify certain products as beneficial for your heart and cholesterol levels. (As I've discussed before, studies to support something like this are invariably paid for by the industry that hopes to gain from the outcome, and the desired results are so likely that these are almost unquestionably skewed.) Cereal basically never looked back. Now you walk down the aisle of your grocery store and cereal promises to fix your heart, make multivitamins obsolete, provide probiotics normally found in yogurt, omega 3s, and so on.

Of course this is a pretty transparent cycle of ruthless marketing to children and then making parents feel good about letting their kids eat what they want to eat. Unfortunately, food isn't so simple. I won't go on here as I have multiple times before on this, but it warrants repeating that foods are meant to be eaten whole. We know this because when they are eaten whole they provide benefits that can never fully be achieved by isolating what we think is beneficial (say omega 3s), sticking just that part in a pill or other food, and consuming it that way. Of all the things we don't fully understand in this world, nutrition is one of them. There is something in the flax seed, the hemp seed or the salmon that helps our bodies fully appreciate the omega 3s. Strip that out and you'll get your omega 3s, but they won't be equally beneficial.

A serving of rice krisipes now gives you 25% of required nutrients? Serve your kid 4 servings a day with water and lets see how long he lives.