Cereal offenders: what’s in your breakfast?

Breakfast cereals have long attracted the attention of food and health campaigners: often perceived and marketed as a healthy food, many contain high quantities of salt, fat and sugar. Nutritional labelling can be confusing and make comparisons difficult, while recommended servings are mostly smaller than we actually consume. Health claims are often misleading and less healthy cereals marketed to children.

While the cereal industry appears happy to produce a limited range of healthier cereals, it’s also committed to the continued production and marketing of less healthy lines.

Which? cereals: Going against the Grain

In its Going Against the Grain report (published today), Which? acknowledges some improvements in the nutritional content of cereals over recent years but highlights some alarming indications of just how much further improvement is needed:

• Of 100 surveyed cereals, nearly 60% contained more sugar than a jam doughnut (per recommended serving)
• Of 100 surveyed cereals, 16% contained as much or more salt than a packet of salt and vinegar crisps
• Only 1 cereal marketed at children wasn’t high in sugar
• Only 1 cereal qualifies for a nutritional green light for its sugar, fat, saturated fat and salt content – Nestlé’s Shredded Wheat

Shredded Wheat: one good cereal

Cereal offenders and healthier options

The Which? report assesses the nutritional content of 100 breakfast cereals, detailing the salt, fat, saturated fat and sugar contents per 100g, and listing the worst offenders and healthier options in each category. Amongst the worst offenders are Morrisons Choco Crackles (38.4g sugar per 100g) and Tesco Special Flakes (2g salt per 100g).

More information and full nutritional details can be found in the report, available at the Choosing a healthy breakfast cereal pages of the Which? website.

Comparing cereals and servings

Comparing cereals isn’t straightforward: manufacturers variously provide nutritional details for recommended servings (of various sizes), per 100g and with or without milk. Some use the FSA’s recommended traffic light labelling system, while others quote GDAs. Adding to this confusion, some cereals aimed at children misleadingly cite adult GDAs.

Recommended serving or portion sizes are another source of confusion, varying between 25g and 50g. But we tend to eat more than the recommended serving anyhow.

Research commissioned by the FSA examined the difference between actual and recommended servings, finding that between 75% and 90% of consumers tended to eat more than the recommended amount of various cereals, with mean actual servings between 65% and 150% larger than those recommended.

Frosted beef?

Some breakfast cereals also contain animal products. A recent Food Magazine article, Where’s the beef? In your breakfast cereal, investigated unexpected and hidden animal products in food and drink products, finding beef gelatine openly listed as an ingredient of Kellogg’s Frosted Wheats. Although the ingredients clearly listed the beef gelatine in this case, there was no other indication that the product was unsuitable for vegetarians.

There’s little we can take for granted about the ingredients of breakfast cereals. The only way to be sure of the actual levels of salt, sugar, fat and other ingredients that we’ll consume is to scrutinise labels with a thorough understanding of ingredients, nutritional requirements and our own consumption.

Despite the apparent profusion of information on product labels, it can be difficult to find full details of ingredients and composition. Even Which?’s own researchers weren’t able to complete their analysis of the 100 breakfast cereals, as information simply wasn’t available on levels of intrinsic and added sugars, an essential distinction for traffic light labelling.

Towards healthier cereals

Which? sets out a call to action for further improvements to the content and marketing of breakfast cereals:

• Stop marketing cereals high in sugar, salt or fat to children.
• Use the labelling scheme that works best for consumers – the FSA’s traffic light labelling system. This makes it easy for consumers to identify the amounts of fat, sugar, salt and saturates in their foods.
• Make further cuts to the levels of sugar and salt products contain, where possible.
• Stop making health and nutrition claims on less healthy products, so that consumers are not misled.
• Develop and market a wider range of healthy cereals, so that consumers who want to eat healthily have a greater choice.
• Extend the TV advertising restrictions so that less healthy foods aren’t targeted at children during programmes they are most likely to watch.
• Ensure restrictions cover the wide range of non-broadcast methods (such as product packaging, sponsorship and the internet) that are currently used to promote less healthy food to children.

(Which? Going against the Grain)

These seem entirely reasonable demands to make of a range of products that most people expect to be healthy anyhow.

Will cereal manufacturers respond positively?

Indications of the likely response of the food industry are not promising. Earlier this month, Nestlé responded to earlier calls for it to change its unhealthy cereal products by asserting that:

the company was committed to ongoing reformulation for a healthier range of breakfast cereals, it was still providing sweeter, more taste-focused products as well

So, while Nestlé produces one of the healthiest cereals on the market, Shredded Wheat, and is happy to reformulate its “healthier range”, it’s committed to a strategy of maintaining the rest of its range with no change.

Update – Kellogg’s responds to criticism

In response to the widespread reporting of the high sugar content of many cereals, Kellogg’s has posted some “helpful facts” about their cereals on its website, under the heading Worried about sugar?:

There have been a lot of reports in the press last week about sugar in breakfast cereals and, as a result, you might have questions. If so, you may find the following facts about our food helpful…

• An average bowl of our cereals with milk contains approximately 170 cals. That’s less than 10% of your recommended guideline daily calorie intake
• Nutritionists recommend that a meal should give you around 25% of your nutritional requirements – a bowl of cereals, with milk, is well below that
• A bowl of sweetened cereals, such as Frosties, contains around two teaspoons of sugar – less than a couple of slices of toast and jam, a piece of fruit and yoghurt or a cup of sweetened tea
• Recent reports talk about high sugar levels in some cereals but those reports look at 100g of cereals. People eat cereals, such as Special K, in 30g portions so you’d need to eat more than three bowls full to take in the levels of sugar quoted in these reports
• We label every box of cereal we sell with the nutritional details per portion. That way people can make easy comparisons between products and brands
• Independent scientific research consistently proves that people who eat breakfast cereals, regardless of how much sugar is in them, tend to have a lower body mass index (are slimmer) than those that don’t
• One in five of us skip breakfast regularly and, every year, children spend up to £500m on sweet treats on the way to school instead of eating a bowl of cereal
• That means they’re missing out on a breakfast that contains fibre, vitamins, iron and calcium

So look beyond the hype, read the labels and make up your own mind. If you do you’ll find that breakfast cereals are not only a convenient choice but a nutritious one too.

Direct answers to the demands of the Which? call to action (such as not to market the most sugary cereals at children and not to make misleading health claims) and acknowledgement of other issues (for example that most of us eat more than the recommended portion sizes) would have been more helpful still.

It’s worth repeating: “look beyond the hype, read the labels and make up your own mind”.