Despite people older than you appearing to have grown up strong and healthy, every mouthful of food that passed their lips as a kid was essentially poison. Yes, they may have ate a slice of white bread every day and suffered no ill effects, but they didn’t know the flour and starch would cause lungworm and certain death. Same goes for eggs, fish, red meat, white meat, vegetables and apples. And water. And breakfast cereals, too.

Health campaigners are going to war on the big brands with the help of Channel 4’s Dispatches programme tonight, after researchers measured the amount of sugar and salt in breakfast cereals and made direct comparisons to the most unhealthy alternatives they could think of, ignoring all other nutritional information at hand. For example, in the corner of the British Heart Foundation:

“Researchers discovered a Tesco jam doughnut contained 8.6g of sugar while 30g of Kellogg’s Frosties were laden with 11.1g of sugar. The investigation also showed that 30g bowl of Kellogg’s cornflakes has more salt than a bag of Walkers Ready Salted crisps.”

In retaliation, a Kellogg’s spokes person pointed out:

“The reality is a single serving of Frosties or Coco Pops has the same amount of sugar in it as glass of orange juice or a banana. It’s important to remember that a doughnut contains around 14 times the level of fat as a single bowl of Frosties.”

And a Nestlé spokesperson added:

“On average cereals contribute less than 10 per cent of the average adult daily intake of sugars and less than 6 per cent of the average daily sugar intake in children.”

In other words, as long as you and your kids aren’t eating a box of cereal a day and nothing else, you probably don’t have as much to worry about as the headlines will no doubt suggest.

[The Telegraph]

As a child, this writer enjoyed eating sugar. I had it on my breakfast cereal, I’d dip bananas in it to give them an added sweetness, and I’m pretty sure I had a sugar sandwich on at least one occasion. I look back on the wildly-fluctuating mood swings of my formative years, the hyperactivity and lethargy as a sign of the times. It was what we did back then.

But you get older, you wise up and you realise that, nutritionally speaking, if you don’t smarten up your act, you’re probably not all that far away from a diabetes diagnosis.

You can help knock some sense into your daft, sugar-craving head by checking out this site. It illustrates, using the magic of sugar cube pyramids, just how much of the sweet stuff is in the foods we scoff, and it is utterly, utterly terrifying.

It’s worth looking at some of the pictures and wondering, if someone presented you with those amounts of raw sugar and invited you to consume them, would you? No, of course not – you’d probably stab them in the eyeball with a biro.

Oh, it’s all very depressing. And how the hell am I supposed to eat my bananas now?

[SugarStacks]