new Health News – Marketing Unhealthy Cereals to Children is Not the Problem
A discover about children’s health released by Yale University in Washington D.C. at the annual meeting of the Obesity Council, shows that the most unhealthy breakfast cereals are the cereals most often marketed to children.
The behold found that cereals marketed directly to children have 85 per cent more sugar, 65 per cent less fibre and 60 per cent more sodium than cereals marketed to adults. This is a perfect storm of nutritional badness guaranteed to cause health problems in anyone who consumes such a mixture regularly.
The authors go on to indite cereal manufacturers for targeting children with advertising and in-store promotions. They suggest self-regulation of advertising is not effective and stronger regulation would be in order.
But the inquire of arises, does advertising force parents to catch products? Do advertisers force parents to feed their children nutritionally bankrupt food? Or is that a choice parents beget and follow through with on their absorb?
The fact is, children do not capture breakfast cereal, parents do. Cereal companies do force parents to achieve candy-like breakfast products in the pantry to the exclusion of grand healthier foods. Cereal companies do not force-feed these products to petite Johnny or Jill, parents do.
While cereal manufacturers deserve no praise, the jam is NOT the nutritionally bankrupt cereal. The plight is PARENTS win IT AND FEED IT TO THEIR CHILDREN.
The pickle is NOT advertising.
The jam is parents seize these ridiculous products masquerading as food, feed it to their minute darlings, and then wonder why there are so many overweight kids and why their children are over weight and illness-prone.
The solution is NOT government control or increased regulation. There are already a zillion government regulations in all areas of life that, for the most fraction, do nothing but raise taxes, inhibit freedom, drive up costs and build more problems than they solve.
The solution to the “broad cereal advertising crisis” is for parents to obtain responsibility for their childrens nutritional welfare and not leave it up to the advertising department of a cereal company.
The solution is for parents to learn the basics of kids nutrition and learn which foods are healthy and why, and which foods extinguish health regardless of how catchy the slogan is or how cute the animal mascot happens to be.
My grandchildren have no taste whatsoever for the nutritionally bankrupt sludge many children live on because my children, the parents, understand the basics of nutrition and know without doubt that a diet of high carbohydrate foods makes you corpulent and destroys your health and they know why this is suitable. And because they understand the basics of how protein, carbohydrates and fleshy affect metabolism and how metabolism determines your and your childrens health, they are never hypnotized by dancing lions or cute bears into buying boxes of nutritional junk trying to imitate healthy food.
We all deem we know everything about everything, but we do not. And if our knowledge of nutrition comes primarily from advertising or from an unschooled recitation of the same frail pop-nutrition advice that has resulted in 68% of America being overweight, then we are doomed.
Without an true notion of what food does when you achieve it in your mouth, chew and swallow, you simply cannot beget an informed nutritional decision and you are forever at the mercy advertisers claims. And advertisers are in the business of selling things, not producing the healthiest possible products. And no amount of regulation will change that.
The ONLY contrivance to fabricate agreeable choices for your children or yourself is to be informed. Learn the basics of diet, nutrition and metabolism well enough that you can apply them when you eat out or when you lift items at a grocery store you intend to prepare and feed to yourself and the people you esteem and care about most.
Children do not capture breakfast cereal, parents do. Regulating advertising will not invent children healthy, parents making informed choices and helping their children design healthy eating habits will.