<story><title>Breakfast cereal is in long-term decline</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/cereal-decline-breakfast-trend-6dd591e8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arzig</author><text>As someone from the us, I’m deeply skeptical of government nutritional labeling &amp;#x2F; recommendation since the travesty of the food pyramid when I was young. 
Cereals were basically the best thing to eat because how else where you going to fill the foundation of the pyramid with your 11 (exact number is fuzzy) recommended servings of grains per day. The pyramid was shown proudly on all the boxes. 
 Meanwhile protein and fats were to be minimized. 
It may not be causal, but it certainly didn’t help the obesity problem in this country that the government explicitly recommended everyone fill up in foods that aren’t actually filling.</text></item><item><author>greatgib</author><text>I used to like having cereals for the breakfast, but now, everytime I plan to buy some in the supermarket, I&amp;#x27;m cooled down because of how unhealthy they are.&lt;p&gt;In France, there is something called the &amp;quot;nutriscore&amp;quot;. It is a score between A and F that has to be prominently displayed on the packaging of products. It indicates how this product compares with others in the same kind of category on a healthy related scale.
Industrial breakfast cereals are very bad. Easily D or E.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>conductr</author><text>It’s not the government’s fault when they said cereal, they meant healthy oats and grains but instead people bought fruity pebbles. I remember being a kid in the 80s and it was very much understood that the healthy cereal was the plain cheerios and unsweetened corn flakes and stuff that nobody (especially kids) wanted to eat-or we’d just add a ton of sugar to it at home.&lt;p&gt;If you want to blame government for lack of regulation in terms of proliferation of unhealthy food over the years, ok that I get. When they issue guidelines (pyramid) and people just completely misinterpret&amp;#x2F;ignore it, that’s people shooting their feet.</text></comment>
<story><title>Breakfast cereal is in long-term decline</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/cereal-decline-breakfast-trend-6dd591e8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>arzig</author><text>As someone from the us, I’m deeply skeptical of government nutritional labeling &amp;#x2F; recommendation since the travesty of the food pyramid when I was young. 
Cereals were basically the best thing to eat because how else where you going to fill the foundation of the pyramid with your 11 (exact number is fuzzy) recommended servings of grains per day. The pyramid was shown proudly on all the boxes. 
 Meanwhile protein and fats were to be minimized. 
It may not be causal, but it certainly didn’t help the obesity problem in this country that the government explicitly recommended everyone fill up in foods that aren’t actually filling.</text></item><item><author>greatgib</author><text>I used to like having cereals for the breakfast, but now, everytime I plan to buy some in the supermarket, I&amp;#x27;m cooled down because of how unhealthy they are.&lt;p&gt;In France, there is something called the &amp;quot;nutriscore&amp;quot;. It is a score between A and F that has to be prominently displayed on the packaging of products. It indicates how this product compares with others in the same kind of category on a healthy related scale.
Industrial breakfast cereals are very bad. Easily D or E.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>donatj</author><text>Did you actually base what you ate on the food pyramid?&lt;p&gt;I have heard this levied against the government before as having caused the obesity epidemic, but I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat.&lt;p&gt;I grew up in the same period, they showed us the pyramid in school and I literally never gave it a second thought.</text></comment>