SUGAR COATED

What’s in the box?

Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University, and Lisa Sutherland, former vice president of nutrition at Kellogg, write that grains are the principal food source across the world eaten directly, as porridges, or ground into flour for bread. But ready-to-eat breakfast cereals are a 19th-century American invention created by “a succession of religiously influenced health-food faddists and fanatics.” They shared the belief (still popular) that ill health is the result of the American diet, lacking nutrients and full of toxins. The faddists’ solution was a bland diet of mashed grains, so tasteless that it was confined to health spas and sanitoriums that were popular at the time. Matters improved as 1900 passed with the arrival of big-time entrepreneurs, the discovery of vitamins, an increasing focus on the child health, and, most important, the revelation that adding sugar makes cereal tasty. “Cereals may have started out as simple, highly nutritious grain foods for the health conscious,” Nestle and Sutherland write, “but they ended up as candy and cookies for breakfast for adults as well as kids.” It’s estimated that breakfast cereals generated $88 billion in global revenues in 2025—$23 billion of it in the U.S. General Mills and Kellogg make up 60% of worldwide sales, the authors say. The book includes dozens of color images of cereal boxes and their torrent of health claims. The authors write: “For decades, consumer groups and child-health advocates have petitioned the FDA—or have sued cereal companies—to remove unhealthful ingredients and misleading statements from the boxes.” Campaigns to eliminate unhealthy foods sometimes succeed, but people love sugar: Roughly half of baby boomers “say they still love the same cereals they loved as children.” And, when tested, people believe that highly colored food tastes better.

An entertaining examination of an industry whose many customers have a sweet tooth.