Strollerderby : cereal

Skip The Cereal, Buy The Marshmallows

Brett Singer — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:45:00 GMT

When I was younger I had a strange dream. I had a job as an idea man at a cereal company. My big idea was to put raisins in everything. Raisin Corn Flakes. Raisin Rice Krispies. Raisin Froot Loops. Everyone at the company loved it. I was a big success.

That never happened, of course. Part of the reason is that anyone can put raisins into their cereal whenever they want to. But what about the marshmallows? Not real marshmallows, those don't hold up as well under a barrage of milk. I mean "marshmallows", the kind found in Lucky Charms. (Mmmm... Lucky Charms... OK, I'm back.) What if you want to put them on your oat bran?

Well -- if I may slip into announcer mode for a moment here -- now you can! Thanks to CerealMarshmallows.com!

Here is what the sellers of this product have to say about it (punctuation and capitalization errors left intact):

"Cereal Marshmallows are great tasting Marshmallows Comparable to the leading cereal with marshmallows, But this is 100% Marshmallows only, Give your cereal a great taste and when add them to regular oat bran or wheat bran cereal, They make it taste great and it's a great way to get kids (or adults) to enjoy eating healthier cereal."

It's a little bit like The Sneaky Chef, except that you are putting sweetness onto healthy food instead of the other way around.

My main reservation isn't the idea of putting a sugary substance onto something healthy. I put brown sugar on my oatmeal almost every morning. It's the fact that there are no ingredidents listed on the website. And that you order via PayPal. The possibility exists that some lunatic is simply buying Lucky Charms and pulling the marshmallows out of the box, throwing them in a bag and selling them to you. Which would be gross.

Other than that, you know. Great idea. Sure.

Would you buy these for your kids? Or, you know, for yourself?

Source: Buzzfeed

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Who's Eating Kid Cereals? Us

JeanneSager — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

That silly rabbit and leapin' leprechaun are in for a surprise. It isn't kids they need to protect their sugar-coated cereals from. It's adults.

A new study says fifty-eight percent of kid-centric cereals are being spooned up morning after morning by folks who don't sit down to watch Saturday morning cartoons and the requisite Trix and Lucky Charms commercials.

The American Dietetic Association found that "adult" cereals are generally pretty healthy, and research has shown that seventy-eight percent of successful dieters eat breakfast on a daily basis. So are we figuring that it's parents who lose weight because they're keeping the "bad" stuff off of their shelves, leaving other adult Americans to bulk up on Boo Berry?

After all, remember all that news last year that two-thirds of kid's cereals are loaded down with sugar and are really bad for them. Considering the numbers, less than half of kid cereal eaters are kids, that means either the adults eating aren't parents or they're buying and hiding the sweet treats from the kids.

I don't know how things work at your house, but I can't get much by my daughter. Slip a box of Froot Loops in the grocery cart, and she's bound to be bouncing off the walls by the time we start unpacking those reusable bags, begging for a bowl of toucan treats. Do you hide food from your kids?

Image: Cereal Buzz

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They Say: Margarine Makes You Stupid

Amy Kuras — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:06:00 GMT

Want to make your child stupider? Feed them margarine. If you’re looking to boost their intellect, though, feed them fish once a week and bread and cereal gains four times a day.

See? I KNEW carbs were our friends!

That’s the upshot of a major New Zealand study that looked at children’s IQ levels, diets and family situations.

It found margarine is strongly correlated with lower IQ scores, which is not so great for lower income kids because margarine is cheaper than butter. Fish and grains were linked with higher IQ scores.

Interestingly, another thing that shows a link with high IQ was alcohol use during pregnancy. The study found that mothers who drank moderate amounts of alcohol while pregnant had children with much higher IQs, than those who did not.

That’s at odds with an earlier New Zealand study that found negative effects at very low levels of alcohol consumption. It showed mothers who had one drink a week could change their child's behavior, and one drink a day could damage the child's cognitive skills.

As someone who had the occasional glass of wine during pregnancy, I like the first finding better.

The study covers 600 New Zealand children of European descent and has been doing so since their mother’s pregnancies with them.

Like any other “magical food” study, take this with a huge grain of salt (heh) – after all, finding out fish and grains are good is hardly news. How many of us were exhorted by our moms to eat fish with the words “It’s brain food!”

The 6 Creepiest Marketing Campaigns Aimed at Children

Cole Gamble — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Our friends at Cracked have done it again, revealing the dark forces at work against our children. Among the evils preying upon our kids? Lucky Charms, Abercrombie and Fitch, Santa Claus and Rachel Leigh Cook.

So what terrible things are they telling our children?

Here are some highlights from the Cracked piece:

1 900 Santa Scam

This 900 number commercial asked kids to hold the phone up to the TV while the TV played touch tones that actually made the phone dial the number and let the phone bill crank into high gear.

Back to School Sleeping Pills

Rozerem, the sleep medication with Abraham Lincoln and a beaver in its ads, starting targeting its drug to kids. Or at least that’s the way it seemed. In 2006 they aired a commercial that stated, "Rozerem would like to remind you that it's back to school season" over images of school kids and classrooms and buses. No thanks, I’ll keep my kids off the drugs and stick to my tried and true method of getting them to sleep: booze. Always works for me.

Check out the whole article Here.

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Kid's Cereal Bad, Adults' Cereal Good

Amy Kuras — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:16:00 GMT

Breakfast for many of us families is a bowl of cereal (often gulped down standing up before running off to work or school). Sometimes, it's even dinner on the craziest days. It's convenient, quick and generally pretty nutritious.
But if you're letting your kids pick the cereal, you may be serving them a less healthy meal than you'd hope.
An analysis in the Journal of The American Dietetic Association found that two-thirds of cereals marketed to children – which meant they had a licensed character or an activity directed towards kids on the box – didn’t meet national standards for sugar content and other aspects.
They also make misleading health claims, like "made with whole grain" or "low in sugar" when in fact they can be just as high in calories or low in fiber as cereals without the health claims.
The ADA suggests instant oatmeal as an alternative – my kid loves the stuff, and the unflavored kinds aren’t sugar laden and good with a topping of fruit. My mother-in-law's trick is to top a healthy cereal with a sweeter kind. And a dietician even suggested serving cereal as dessert, so it's clearly delineated that sugary items like that are treats instead of healthy meals.
The good news is, adult cereals are pretty much OK from a nutritional standpoint, and few cereals, even the super sugary ones, are fairly low in calories even if those calories are empty. So if your kid will eat your bran flakes, let them – they are just as easy and better for you.

Rachael Ray Eat Your Heart Out: 3 Second Meals Easy and Tasty

Rachael Brownell (Redsy) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:03:00 GMT

Rachael Ray is cute. I'll give you that. Plus, the girl can really spell. But I'm not sure she's simplified meal-planning and preparation enough for most parents of young children. Many of you work, and in places where the only take-out options are KFC or McDonald's. You come home tired, hungry, and you want to spend quality time with your sweet littles, not slaving for 5 minutes over a hot stove.

And that is the genesis of the 3-second meal. Because even busy, tired parents have three seconds to spare. Am I right? Here's how it works...

First step, lower the bar. Your kids won't remember homecooked meals as much as they'll remember fondly the time you spent sitting next to them on the couch watching their favorite show.

Second, spread out a huge blanket in front of the television and get everyone their own bowl.

Third, fill each bowl with Raisin Bran and milk and voila! Dinner is served.

You're welcome.

Why Tony the Tiger has a Grrrrreat Memory

Karen Murphy — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 18:25:00 GMT

Great. Just when I've totally got my kids (um, and me...) weaned off the sugary cereals, we get the news that they may have some redeeming qualities after all. It turns out that foods with a high glycemic-index (read: tons and tons of sugar) like sweetened cereals may help kids remember words better in the short term. Trix before spelling tests? I can totally see it now, teachers handing out bowls of Cocoa Puffs in order to boost standardized test scores. or is it only my mind that works that way?

But hold on here, don't abandon your organic Purely-Oh's just yet. The study only involved 38 subjects, all teenagers. They were fed either a high glycemic-index (GI) cereal or a high-fiber bran-based low-GI cereal, and then were tested on the names of various fruits, vegetables and spices. The kids who ate the high-GI cereal remembered more than 5% more words. Ooh, scientific, eh? If I ate bran cereal I might not be interested in spouting off names of food either.

Is It Any Wonder Our Kids Are Fat? Cereal Straws

Karen Murphy — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 13:19:00 GMT

I'm both repulsed by and strangely attracted to this new product, which if I understand it correctly is an edible Froot Loop-flavored straw-thing lined with sweetened faux-milk that you (well, your kid, actually) is supposed to suck real milk through. I'm pretty sure I would just skip the milk and crunch down the straw, like eating hardened bottom-of-the-box cereal-dust. Yeah. Yum! Finally someone marketed this little goldmine.

So...verdict? I'm just going to say that it's likely that my strange attraction has something to do with my not having had sugar in weeks and I'm suffering withdrawal, and we'll just chalk this little item up to the ranks of "EWWW" unless you can tell me differently. M'kay?

Disney Going into the Cereal Business? Gag Me

Karen Murphy — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 14:06:00 GMT

Oh, puleeze, someone save me from Disney's new Princess Fairytale Flakes. Please. I'm begging you. And while you're at it, take the Little Einsteins Fruity Stars and the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Berry Crunch with you too. You think I'm kidding? I wish I was. Nope, erstwhile kid-crack purveyor Disney is the latest entry into the already clogged kid's sugary cereal market, teaming up with sell-out General Mills to manufacture this junk.

Don't get me wrong. I love a good box of, say, Froot Loops once in awhile for a nice sugar-high. But I don't feed that crap to my kids. Nor would I be caught dead spooning up some "lightly sweetened, crispy pink corn flakes [that] offer a fairytale beginning to every day." Aaaaaaiiiiiiiii! I hope the copywriter who wrote that tripe got paid some big bucks.

Nutritious? Riiiight. Like crack cocaine with milk. Pass me another bowl of that "magical, nutritious breakfast", please!