To be fair, it’s a bowl of sugar and marshmallows, with a vitamin pill crushed up in it, and sometimes a fiber capsule dumped over it as well. And most kids eat it with 8 ozs of milk. Sometimes high protein milk, low fat milk, so they get 13g protein.
Yes, a scrambled egg, and some yogurt with fresh fruit would certainly be better, and that’s what my son eats for breakfast, but he eats a bowl of something like Cookie Crisp (he has to measure the cereal and milk so he gets an actual serving as described on the box) with Fairlife* (high protein, low lactose) skim milk for his afterschool snack. It satisfies his sweet tooth, and keeps him from wanting to eat thing like cookies, and candy which we don’t keep in the house, except around holidays.
We have dessert only on Shabbat, and he doesn’t mind. We used to have it every day when he was little, but then it was usually just a single cookie, or a “fun size” candy bar.
He also is allowed to have sugar-free hot chocolate, or decaf coffee with Splenda and milk.
This has more to do with cavities than nutrition, though, albeit, nutrition certainly plays a role. He had problems with his baby teeth when he was young, and had some restorations. The dentist said he had soft enamel. I had this as well, and have a lot of restorations, albeit, fortunately not on my front teeth.
The boychick has been lucky, though, and not had this condition with his adult teeth (I had it with both sets, and had braces as well, so I got lots of cavities at 11 & 12). He is 14, and right now, has no fillings or restorations of any kind in his current teeth.
He has to brush immediately after eating anything. There is a picture of him getting a filling at age 2 & 1/2 in the bathroom. It really encourages him to brush.
I see cutting back on sugar, compared to my time, happening all over. Personally, I think it’s a good thing, and it may partly be dentist-driven, and people finally recognize that they really do have some control over how much dental caries they get.
Unfortunately, a lot of the cutting back on sugar is bogus, and comes from the mistaken notion that is makes children “wild.”
In 1974, a guy named Ben Feingold published what came to be known as “the Feingold diet” for AD[H]D recovery. He wanted refined sugar eliminated as much as possible from the diets of “hyperactive” children, as he believed it caused hyperactivity in children with AD[H]D. FTR, he never said it caused wild behavior in children without such a diagnosis, but a lot of parents jumped to that conclusion, mainly because children in situations (holidays, days off from school, birthday parties with high kid:adult ratio) go wild, and also tend to eat a lot of sugar on such occasions. It’s a classic “post
hoc” error.
But at any rate, sugar took a bad hit.
If anyone wants to hear about the brilliant experiment with they “hyper” boys, the kinesiometers, and the sweet snacks, I’ll post it, but I want to end this long post for now.
*Or a brand like it.
Although the buildings were very old and not up to code and the school seemed lacking in resources.