Rice Krispies Boost Your Kids' Immune System Now! (Wash Post)

Washington Post

The Checkup
Health in the News and in Your Life

By Adapted from voices.washpost.com/checkup
Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Scale Back the Sweet Tooth

Do you have any idea how much added sugar you can safely eat in a day?

A new statement from the American Heart Association may surprise many: While the average American is accustomed to ingesting more than 22 teaspoons -- totaling 350 calories -- of "added" sugar per day, we really shouldn't allow ourselves more than about 10 teaspoons, for a total of 150 calories. (That's for men; women should restrict themselves to no more than six teaspoons, for about 100 calories.)

Excess sugar consumption is thought to be a major contributor to Americans' increasing obesity; it's also associated with high blood pressure and other conditions that raise the risk of heart disease and stroke.

"Added" sugars encompass those in regular sodas, fruit drinks, candy, baked goods and sweetened dairy products -- anything that's made to taste sweet by adding caloric sweeteners such as sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. The term does not include foods that are naturally sweet, such as fruit. Sugar also shows up in all kinds of packaged and processed foods that don't necessarily taste all that sweet such as salad dressing and spaghetti sauce.

If I have sweets at breakfast, it sets me up to crave more sugar the whole day. I also avoid processed foods, which means that my salad dressing and pasta sauce are homemade, without any added sugar. If I want sweets, I have to make them, and that is usually more trouble than it's worth.

How Potent Is Your Brand of Cereal?

They snap. They crackle. They pop. But do Rice Krispies boost immunity?

Kellogg's has reformulated its Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereals, fortifying them with vitamins A, C, and E and a bunch of B vitamins. The boxes and ads now tout that "each and every box" of Krispies has ingredients that "help support your child's immunity."

It's a potent message in these days of swine flu fear. Let's take a look:

Some of the added nutrients are believed to help strengthen your immune system, but it's not clear whether they work as well when isolated from the whole foods that naturally contain them, as they are here, as when you get them from, say, an apple or an orange. In any case, they haven't added all that much: The Rice Krispies nutrition facts panel shows that the cereal provides 50 percent of the daily value for iron but only 25 to 30 percent of most of the other nutrients listed. Oddly, there's hardly any fiber in a serving. And a quick glance at the ingredient list isn't encouraging: The first ingredients are rice, sugar, salt, malt flavoring and high-fructose corn syrup.

As has been noted elsewhere, Rice Krispies aren't the worst cereal in the world. They're pretty low-calorie and less sugary than most. But to suggest to parents that feeding them to kids will help protect the little ones against disease -- and that's what they mean when they talk about "boosting immunity" -- seems absurd.

-- Jennifer LaRue Huget