New Haven Independent

“Now helps support your child’s immunity!” Harris (pictured) read aloud with disbelief from a new slogan splashed like milk on the cover of a Cocoa Krispies box. She added a fact that doesn’t appear on the box: San Francisco’s city attorney already has put the company on notice that it’s “misleading” parents and children about the healthfulness of all that sugar, chocolate and high-frucose corn syrup in the box.

Harris makes her living in New Haven figuring out why Americans are getting so fat and what marketers of food like Cocoa Krispies have to do with it.

This week she and colleagues at Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity released a report entitled, “Cereal FACTS: Evaluating the nutrition quality and marketing of children’s cereals.” It concludes that despite promises to the contrary, companies like General Mills and Kellogg’s have been pushing their junkiest, sweetest and saltiest cereals to kids as young as 2 through aggressive online, TV, and supermarket marketing. The report has made a splash, including coverage on ABC News, Good Morning America and Fox News.

The researchers found 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fiber and 60 percent more sodium in cereals marketed directly to kids. None of the cereals meet a new United Kingdom standard for permission to advertise to kids. Yet all the brands meet standards set by the industry itself in voluntary nutritional guidelines.

Click here to read the report, here for a summary.

The Rudd team also launched a website enabling people to research the nutritional value of cereals and search for the most healthful brands.

General Shills

On Wednesday afternoon, Harris found evidence for the report’s finding in Aisle 8 at Shaw’s on Whalley Avenue. The visit also revealed a few surprises — for her, and for shoppers who think they can separate the junk from the chaff in the cereal aisle.

Would you have guessed that one of the worst offenders in the Harris Cereal Bestiary is … General Mills’ Cinnamon Toast Crunch?

“This is the most advertised [junk cereal] to kids,” she reported, picking up the box. She scanned the “Good source of calcium and Vitamin D” message on the front, along with the “whole grain guarantee” banner.

Along the side Harris read three paragraphs of text that pitched eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch as part of a healthful way to grow up.

“General Mills cereals are not any healthier” than any other companies’ brands, she said. In fact, most flunk the Rudd report’s minimum healthfulness standards.

As in the report, the company emerged as the top bogeyman during Harris’s Shaw’s visit.

Harris grabbed a box of Cookie Crisps. “According to General Mills they’re saying it’s better for you,” Harris said.

Reese’s Puffs? “This is the worst one on our list in terms of nutrition,” she reported. And the marketing! Not only does the cereal’s front make the boast about calcium and Vitamin D, Harris said. The side offers a code kids can take home to unlock a General Mills’ website and create their own rap and dancing avatar. That “makes you go ask your mom to buy the box,” Harris said. And “the website is basically advertising to kids.”

“From a calorie and nutrient standpoint, cereal may be the best breakfast choice you could make,” responded General Mills spokeswoman Heidi Geller in an email exchange. “In fact, kids who eat cereal more frequently, including pre-sweetened cereals, tend to weigh less than kids who eat cereal less frequently — and they are better nourished.”

Asked to respond to the Rudd report’s specific critiques about the company’s marketing techniques, Geller said she had no further response.

Kellogg’s offered a more detailed response, through spokesperson Kris Charles. Charles said that in the past three years Kellogg’s has cut in half its advertising to kids under 12 and “advanced self-regulatory principles” through which the cereal company either reformulates the least healthful brands to kids or holds back on marketing them. And the company interrupts kids who are on its website by using a “Get Your Move On” web feature every 15 minutes, “encouraging” them to go do something else.

Click here to read the company’s detailed description of its “Global Nutrient Criteria.”

Rudd’s Harris wasn’t impressed.

“We agree with both Kellogg and General Mills that eating breakfast is very important for children,” she responded in an email. “But we don’t agree that it is healthy for children to start their day with a food that consists of 1/3 or more sugar, which describes all the products that both companies are marketing directly to children.”

She said the new study found no overall decrease in cereal companies marketing junk cereals to children. (The researchers didn’t have data to break down whether individual companies like Kellogg’s decreased, she said. But they did find that average kids under 11 saw more than 200 TV commercials for Kellogg’s cereals from 2008 through March 2009.) Kids often simply keep playing an online game after being interrupted with the suggestion to stop, she said. Cereal companies’ attempts to “self-regulate” have produced no real progress, in her view.

Especially in one area: How products are placed and promoted in supermarkets like Shaw’s.

Frosted Surprise

Not that all the news was bad.

Harris was pleased to find that Cocoa Puffs were on the bottom shelf at Shaw’s. Junk cereals like those usually appear on middle shelves in other supermarkets, she said. Those are the prime eye-level shelves for both parents and little kids riding in carts.

Harris, who’s 51, came across her mission after a mid-life career change. She worked in marketing herself for 20 years. Then she came to Yale to earn a PhD. in psychology, with a focus on the psychology of consumer behavior.

“I got tired of the marketing world. I couldn’t see myself doing that for the next 20 years,” she said. “I wanted to do something that’s more meaningful.”

Harris got a chance to do that with her job at Rudd. With the new report, she and her colleagues hope to convince regulators, parents, and legislators that industry self-regulation “is not working.” She’d like to see more government regulation of cereal marketing, less corporation promotion of junk to kids, and the ability of parents to learn more about the nutritional value of the brands they buy for their families.

“We don’t have anything against cereal,” Harris said. “We’re not trying to say [companies] shouldn’t be selling cereals to kids. But Kix is a much healthier cereal than Cookie Crisp. Cookie Crisp is sold to kids. Kix is sold to adults. To sell it as part of a healthy breakfast is misleading.”

Harris was asked what Aisle 8 kids’ or “family” cereal (marketed to kids and adults alike) ranked the best in the study, Harris picked up a box of … Frosted Mini-Wheats.

Frosted Cereal?

That’s right. It’s the only one that meets a new United Kingdom nutrition standard allowing companies to market cereals to kids.

But doesn’t a “frosted” cereal at least sound junkier, less wholesome, than, say, Honey Nut Cheerios?

Harris offered a theory: People gravitate toward less healthful-sounding cereals under the believe they’ll taste better.

“That [‘frosted’ packaging] might be on purpose,” Harris suggested. “If you have have a cereal that’s healthy, people might think it tastes better because of the frosting.”

Natural food companies’ cereals are found over in Aisle 2 in Shaw’s. It turns out the cereal Harris herself eats isn’t found there. It’s found back in Aisle 8.

“I actually eat Cheerios. I have since I was in elementary school,” she said. “They’re not so bad. They have a little bit of sodium..”

On the Rudd nutritional scale, Cheerios rank about the same as most of the cereals marketed as more healthful over in Aisle 2. That’s plain Cheerios.

Honey Nut Cheerios might sound wholesome, but in fact they’re way too sugary, Harris said. In Aisle 2, she hunted for a cereal sold by health-food company Cascadian Farm: Honey Os.

Most of the cereals in Aisle 2 do rank as more healthful than the major brands in Aisle 8, Harris reported. They also cost more. (Click on the play arrow to watch that and other snippets from her visit.)

Honey Os, it turns out, is no better than the General Mills version, Harris said. Cascadian Farm is owned by … General Mills.