Sugary cereal, your kids, and my snarky advice

Nerd Herder Nicole T posted on The Real Fitness Nerd Facebook page recently asking for an "easy to read, very clear article that explains why it's NOT a good idea to take a 3-year-old to a fast food restaurant once or twice a week."

I haven't had a chance to put together something quite yet, but hopefully this post will be a step in the right direction.

A new study out of Yale University split school-aged kids into two groups. They fed one group sugary cereals and the other group low-sugar cereals. Both groups were allowed to add fruit and sugar.

Kids in the low-sugar group added more sugar than the others, but also more fruit. The sugary group kids ate almost twice as much refined sugar.

The researchers say the results show kids will eat healthier breakfasts with low-sugar cereals, especially if parents offer fresh fruit, and a little extra sugar, too.

I hear ya, Nicole. You're all, "Thanks for the factoid, Real Fitness Nerd, but what's that got to do with my Jack-in-the-Box runs?"

Well, take a load off and let me spell it out for you. What this study tells me is that kids aren't as drawn to crapping up their food as grown-ups are. In the right circumstance, they'll actually self-regulate, with a little help. An experience I had recently with my own daughter is further evidence of this. I've always been picky about the cereals I give her, but I'm not a total sugar scrooge, so I let her eat things like Puffins or the various Kashi cereals. Until recently, I let her eat as much as she wanted, but I started to notice that amount has increased to, well, way too much. Every morning featured a Kilimanjaro-esque mountain of complex carbs - sometimes followed by a demand for seconds. I also started to notice that she'd forgo her usual mid-morning fruit snack - so processed food consumption was inhibiting the eating of whole foods.

My solution was to get out a measuring cup and explain that she could measure out one cup of cereal each morning. After that, if she was still hungry, she could eat as much fruit as she wanted. Then I ran into the living room and hid behind the bunker I'd built the night before out of the couch and whatever wood I could tear up from the floor. I also verified that the parent abuse hotline was still in my speed dial.

To my complete shock, she was fine with the idea. I had explained my logic clearly. She saw my point. Furthermore, she dug the ritual of cereal measuring.

And she's back to eating apples in the morning now, so Happy Ending!

My daughter is 6. Could you imagine how that story might have played out if she were 16? Not so much with the happy ending, for a couple reasons. First off, teenagers are stubborn little bastards. Second off, by that point, they're pretty mired in all the sociological and psychological programming that drives this country to make bad food choices and continues to send our obesity numbers through the roof. Even if you're June Cleaver meets Carol Brady divided by Laura Petrie, your kid is still going to be inundated with advertising, peer pressure, and outside crappy food, all designed to promote bad food choices.

A giant bowl of sugary cereal each morning or a couple Happy Meals a week probably isn't going to cause most active kids to get fat or have heart disease or diabetes. Frankly, if bad eating were left at that, most grown-ups would probably be okay too. However, when you add that to all the other shitty eating your kid will be taught to do over a lifetime, it becomes part of a bigger problem. By making your life easier now, you're probably making their life harder down the road. You don't want to be part of your kids' problems. You want to be part of their solutions.

All this said, we do live in the modern world. I get that. Just as I don't serve my daughter raw oats or straight wheat germ for breakfast, you're not going to go all Amish just because I got on my soapbox.

How about fast food once a week, max, instead of twice?