The Healthfulness of Cereal Packets

Less You

Peanut butter continues to pervade American cuisine. You might have noticed that I’m already on my third different peanut butter cereal here. There’s peanut butter in many of the sugary chocolate treats. The PB&J is the standard food for parents who can’t work out what to serve. And really, it’s a very, very good choice: I believe that you can get all the nutrients you need to survive if you eat enough PB&J sandwiches. Although I am also told that you can also get your daily recommended amounts of every vitamin, mineral, carb, liquid, salt, and so on, from 19 pints of Guinness and one glass of orange juice.  So perhaps being able to get all the nutrients you require shouldn’t be your sole criteria on what to serve.

I am complaining again about different specious health claims today, also peanut butter related. Today I’m writing about Peanut Butter Cheerios. And, I will be honest, I haven’t much to say about them. This is in part because Beth ate most of the pack whilst I was eating other cereals. It is also because they’re pretty unremarkable.

They’re like Cheerios, with a little bit of peanut butter flavour. That is it. There’s not enough peanut butteryness. But they’re not nasty. There’s nothing actually wrong, but also nothing in the least bit exciting. I’m hoping that perhaps some others in the incredibly varied Cheerios line – at last count I saw something like 10 different varieties of Cheerios on the shelves – will turn out better.

One thing that we did discover they were good for was mixing in to other things. Into fruit salad or yoghurt to give a bit of texture, without being overwhelmingly sweet, or offensive, like other cereals are. But that’s damning with faint praise: I should be judging them as a breakfast cereal and, whilst not failing the test, they aren’t bringing any great excitement to the party.

Less Peanut Butter

On to my specious healthfulness whinge. I notice on the pack that we have a claim: “More Grains. Less You.” Is there any plausible explanation for how more grains makes you lose weight? Do you drop the pounds by eating corn and wheat? Or is it the whole-grain-ness? Perhaps fiber makes you shit more, but surely that isn’t a sustainable method of losing weight.

Sure, fiber’s good for you.  I wouldn’t dispute that. But there’s a very big difference between healthy and slimming.

It seems to be part of the classic stylings of the cereal packet: to make claims that are sufficiently vague that you can’t quite pin them down for being misleading, but which if you examine them in any detail at all, even in their vaguest form they seem to be utter nonsense.

It turns out that Cheerios (as I guess most people in the US know) have decided to work hard at their vagueness. In the past they’ve been told by the pharmaceutical regulation body to change the wording on their packets. They had claimed that Cheerios helped reduce cholesterol. And that meant they were marketing themselves as a drug. And that meant they had to undergo far, far stricter tests  and guidelines than just being something people eat.

Cheerios, unsurprisingly, walked back from that precipice very quickly and have toned their language down to much more unproveable claims.