Cart Confessions: Frosted Flakes with Reduced Sugar
Welcome to Cart Confessions, a new feature here on A Better Bag of Groceries, where I confess my grocery sins. Today’s topic is Frosted Flakes with Reduced Sugar.
It all started with regular Frosted Flakes. I’m really not sure how they landed in my grocery cart. My husband and I tend to buy food and hoard it. We have shelves in our basement that are loaded with canned goods and unopened boxes of crackers, pasta, and, of course, cereal. If we ever have a natural disaster or national crisis, we could probably survive a month or two with what we’ve got stored. Cereal has a pretty long shelf life, so it is quite likely that my initial Frosted Flakes purchase pre-dated my start date with NuVal. Anyway, at some point, my children (ages 4 and 6) got their first taste of Frosted Flakes and fell in love. Who wouldn’t? I remember loving them as a kid too.
Last week, on our usual shopping trip, my daughter clamored for Frosted Flakes. It was then that I spotted the Reduced Sugar variety. Cool! Now, I do not yet have NuVal scores in a grocery store in my area, so I have to shop blindly. But I figured that a product with reduced sugar must be better.
I was curious to see if my kids would prefer the regular Frosted Flakes or the Reduced Sugar. So, we held a little taste test.
So, interestingly my kids found that they taste exactly the same. My daughter was pretty adamant about it, in fact. How can a product with reduced sugar taste the same as the regular version? Simple. They need to add something else. Since I am not a dietitian (and I don’t even try to play one on my blog), I turned to Rachel Rodek, MS, RD, LDN, Manager of Nutrition Communications for NuVal to give me the answer.
Rachel says: “When manufacturers reduce an ingredient in a food to make it “more nutritious”, the taste changes. So what do they do to have people still like it and buy it? Add more of another ingredient! And in this case, the culprit is sodium. Reduced Frosted Flakes has 140 mg sodium whereas Reduced Sugar Frosted Flakes has 180 mg. Interestingly enough, the difference in sugar is only 3 grams.”
That added sodium affects the NuVal score. Reduced Sugar Frosted Flakes actually score lower than the regular version.
Regular Frosted Flakes: 24
Reduced Sugar Frosted Flakes: 22
And that is one of the many, many reasons that Dr. David Katz and his team of scientific experts founded NuVal!
Question of the Day
Do you have any cereal sins you’d like to confess?
Posted by: Melissa 6 comments
Posted in: Cart Confessions, Cereal for Kids, Uncategorized
Tags: Frosted Flakes
on Feb 4th, 2010 at 8:28 am
I would not have imagined they’d boost the sodium to keep the sweetness. That’s definitely an interesting way for ingredients to work
on Feb 4th, 2010 at 9:25 am
Wow, that is pretty amazing. Especially when you think the reduced sugar would be better. Very helpful information to know.
on Feb 4th, 2010 at 9:35 am
mmm…I do miss my frosted flakes.hehe…CC
on Feb 4th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
I want to cast James and Caroline in Hollywood!!!! I am not surprised but they did a great job telling it like it is
on Feb 4th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
My favorite cereal, Quaker Natural Granola, oats honey and raisins has a Score of 23, I was really disappointed. I wonder if the lowfat Blueberry muffin from DD that I am now eating for breakfast scores any better?
on Feb 5th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
I love this! Your kids are adorable- it would be fun to see them do more taste tests in the future.