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Action on Sugar

Breakfast cereals with packaging that may appeal to children... one year later

By Dr Kawther Hashem RNutr (Public Health) - Campaign Lead, Action on Sugar  

As you know (we don’t keep it secret!), a big part of our work at Action on Salt and Sugar is making sure food companies do what they can to improve the nutritional quality of the food they make. One area we have scrutinised for many years has been breakfast cereals.

Some may question why; yes, breakfast cereals can be a highly nutritious breakfast choice, providing a good source of energy, fibre and key vitamins and minerals to the diet, however it can also be a deceiving choice, with many containing excessive levels of free sugars, salt and saturated fat. Not only this, but those less healthy breakfast cereals are usually the enticing batch that lure children with cartoon characters, bright colours, prizes and on pack activities.

So, as part of the work we are doing with the Food Foundation for their Broken Plate report, we tracked the sugar, salt and fibre content of these child-friendly breakfast cereals (not so friendly nutritionally though) over the last year.

I can gladly say that our years of scrutinising these products, naming companies for producing products that are giving kids a sweet tooth for breakfast with their enticing packaging, has been worthwhile – things are getting better!

We found that only in the last year, over a third of the cereals would be deemed high in sugar, an improvement from nearly half of the cereals surveyed in 2019. The average sugar content also reduced by 3g/100g between 2019 and 2020, from 21.4g/100g to 18.4g/100g.

'Malt O Meal Marshmallow Mateys' was the only cereal in both reports that was high in salt, and actually increased in salt from 1.6g/100g to 1.7g/100g. Otherwise, cereals have overall improved on the salt front, with 4 in 10 now low in salt, compared to 1 in 10 in 2019.

Fibre has been the selling point for cereals for a long time, an important part of our diet with many of us consuming too little. However it's important to ensure the fibre we consume doesn't come from cereals high in sugar. Nearly 4 in 10 cereals with packaging that appeals to children were low in fibre.

Finding THE perfect cereal with cartoon characters on pack was hard to come by – only 3 cereals had a green label for sugar, salt, saturated fat and fibre; Troo Calm Porridge +, Troo Happy Porridge with Flaxseed Omega 3s and Uplifting Cinnamon and Shredded Wheat Bitesize. Remember kids can have the ‘adult’ cereals, those with less colourful packaging, they are probably healthier for them, think wheat biscuits (aka Weetabix).

This year Asda, Aldi and Lidl all made statements to say they were removing cartoon characters from cereal packaging. Data collection for this survey was carried out before these changes were put in place, so there may be less unhealthy breakfast cereals with cartoon characters on supermarket shelves now. However, it is not enough for companies to remove cartoon characters; the resulting design must not be attractive to children, otherwise it defeats the purpose.

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