Cereal? Cookies? Oh, What’s the Diff?

We all know the importance of real food in the morning: kids who eat high-sugar breakfasts have a harder time in school, and a growing body of research suggests that foods sweetened with sugar or high-fructose corn syrup can be as addictive as nicotine or cocaine. It’s clear, too, that for most of us the eating patterns we develop as children hang around forever.

Every parent of a child born in the United States since 1950 also knows the difficulty of getting that kid to eat a breakfast of real food. This is not a “natural” inclination—no one is born craving Froot Loops or Count Chocula—but one resulting from a bombardment of marketing.

So for more than half a century well-intentioned parents have been torn between their desperation to get their kids to eat something, anything, and the knowledge that most packaged breakfast cereals are little better than cookies.

It turns out that from at least the perspective of sugar content, many are worse, as a document from the Environmental Working Group shows. There are at least 44 cereals that contain more sugar in a cup than three Chips Ahoy cookies. A cup of the most sugary cereal, Kellogg’s Honey Smacks—they were called Sugar Smacks when I was a kid, but “Honey” is so much healthier-sounding, don’t you think?—contains more sugar than a Hostess Twinkie.

So what else is new?

Not, certainly, the unchecked power held by junk food companies that brought us dessert disguised as breakfast in the first place; that’s as old as the eight-track. Back in the ’70s, consumer protection groups, prompted by increasing rates of childhood obesity, petitioned the government to regulate food marketing to kids. In 1978 the Federal Trade Commission (F.T.C.) issued proposed restrictions, but a few years and a few million dollars of food and advertising industry lobbying took care of those. By 1980 Congress had essentially stripped the F.T.C. of its authority to regulate marketing to kids.

Thirty years later, childhood obesity rates have tripled, PepsiCo is using horror computer games to sell kids Doritos, and the F.T.C. and Big Food are once again duking it out. Except it’s a mismatch: Big Food is the heavyweight champ and the F.T.C. is an outgunned welterweight.

Earlier this year, a federal interagency working group (including the F.T.C.) submitted a draft of its recommended standards for marketing food and beverages to kids. The proposal effectively requests that manufacturers stop pushing junk to kids, at least that junk containing more than 15 percent saturated fat, 210 milligrams of sodium, or 13 grams of added sugar—about a tablespoon—per “serving.” (Since the “serving sizes” used for calculations are usually unrealistically small, one tablespoon is in reality two.)

The proposed guidelines were completely voluntary, and while it seems unlikely that junk food companies ever intended to comply, they nevertheless pushed back hard against what they absurdly called job-killing regulation. At hearings held in October before the House Commerce and Health committees, they railed against the guidelines, and a recent report found that the food and advertising companies actively opposing the guidelines have spent more than $37 million on lobbying this year. (This number includes other lobbying efforts, but in any case, that’s some serious clout.)

The same report found that Jo Ann Emerson, Republican of Missouri, the congresswoman who inserted language into an appropriations bill that would prohibit the F.T.C. from submitting a final draft of the guidelines before completing a full cost-benefit analysis, counts among her campaign donors PACs for PepsiCo, the American Beverage Association, and the National Restaurant Association—all of which have actively lobbied against the guidelines, of course. No conflict of interest there, and nothing surprising either.

Nor is it news that this lobbying is working. The F.T.C. is backing off some parts of its original guidelines, including constricting the target range from age 2 to 17 to age 2 to 11. (No doubt because 14-year-olds are mature enough to see through the marketing, right?) The agency is also no longer recommending that cartoon characters like Tony the Tiger or the Lucky Charms leprechaun be removed from products that fail to meet nutritional standards.

Let me remind you that the guidelines were voluntary in the first place. How much more backing off can you do? We expect that the junk food industry is unwilling to agree to the F.T.C.’s increasingly lame voluntary standards. Why, after all, should they?

But here’s what might be an actual surprise: The industry is even unable to follow the rules they themselves make. In response to the F.T.C. proposal, the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (that’s a junk food front group) released its own nutrition guidelines, which happen to allow almost 50 percent more sugar than the lax and voluntary number set by the F.T.C.

Only one-quarter of the 84 cereals reviewed by E.W.G. meet the F.T.C. voluntary guidelines. But that same number of cereals don’t meet the lame guidelines that the industry set for itself. You read that right: Apple Jacks, the especially aggressively marketed Froot Loops, and 19 other cereals contain even more sugar than the industry’s own guidelines recommend.

Regardless of the industry, self-regulation is a joke. What our kids are eating, on the other hand, is serious. And changing what they eat is going to require mandating—not requesting—the way that the junk food industry is allowed to manipulate them. The most important meal of the day is as good a place as any to start.

DECEMBER 8, 2011