10 March 2011

Now, What Are We Going to Eat For Breakfast?

Reinforces Chapter 6: The Seeds of Ill-health

You may have read recently that, because of the use of recycled newspapers being used in the manufacture of cardboard used to make breakfast cereal boxes the boxes pose a serious cancer risk.

How times have changed.

I remember, many years ago, reading a study conducted on rats, which tested the relative nutritional merits of different breakfast cereals. In this study, the rats were divided into groups and each group was given a different breakfast cereal to live on. Then the last group was fed on the chopped-up cardboard breakfast cereal boxes.

Guess which group lived longest.

I expect you chose correctly: Yes, it was the group that ate the chopped up cereal boxes.

I regret that I can't find the reference for this study now, but the American consumer advocate, Robert Choate, quoted the study to a U.S. Senate subcommittee in Washington in 1970 as an example of the woeful nutritional inadequacy of breakfast cereals.

So this latest news must have come as something of a bombshell to the masses. Now, it seems, the only healthy thing about breakfast cereals you could rely on - the cardboard boxes they come in - can no longer be trusted either.

Oh dear! What on earth are we going to eat now? some will cry.

Me? I'll stick to my scrambled eggs for breakfast.