Do you have 'Breakfast Guilt'?

Phil: So on a personal level, you ever feel guilty about serving the kids breakfast?

Sally: All the time?  

Phil: No, no. Well, General Mills has a new survey that came out that talks about the guilt and pressure that parents feels when it comes to breakfast time. 92% of parents agree. It's important that their child eats breakfast every day. Oh and 37% of them, a third, feel guilty about their child's overall eating habits. What they find is only families who have higher incomes can afford to provide nutritious food options for their family. I sort of disagree with that. And 65% are concerned about their ability to provide a healthy breakfast due to inflation and rising grocery costs. And, oh, surprise, it's a General Milsl survey. So they say, but there's a simple solution, kids already love cereal. So give your kids cereal. This is one of those surveys, in my opinion, that shouldn't be published. That shouldn't be out there. We shouldn't even be talking about this. Bottom line is this is self-serving. 

Phil: These are, you know, dramatic numbers that drive people to say, "oh, well, let's do cereal". And you know what we find at the same time, that General Mills is doing that, Kelloggs is doing something really cool. They've partnered with the Grain Foods Foundation. And what they're doing is they want to build a better breakfast made with whole enriched or fortified grains. They're calling it cereal mashups. So you combine, you know, your own thing. This is not a new product. You take one box here, one box here, you pour it together. Frosted mini wheats and special K or twisty crispies, which is Kellogg's rice crispies and Kellogg's Coco crispies. You know, I'm not sure I like those combinations, but I like this whole mash up idea and, you know, go beyond just Kelloggs. But look at some of the healthier cereals that are out there and, you know, forget the Lucky Charms, forget Fruit Loops, stuff like that, but just healthy cereals that you could blend together and make your own mash up. I think that's a cool idea, but this survey, I mean, for me, that's just horrible. 

Sally: Yes, it is. It is very misleading. And, you know, we wanna make sure that our kids are getting fruits and vegetables in them and the whole grains. So, you know, sometimes cereal isn't going to always cut it. But I do love the Kellogg's idea of making that a little bit better. I also feel like I'm gonna go back to, we talk about retail dietitians a lot, and I'm gonna go back to saying that this is a great opportunity for RD's to educate their shoppers on creative ways to make breakfast for their kids. You know, something interesting that happened to me when my son wasn't eating breakfast, I went to the pediatritian with him and I said, "he's not eating breakfast". And she said, what's his favorite food? And, I said sushi. And she said, well, then give him sushi for breakfast. So that's a difficult thing to do. And we don't do that. But the point being that it doesn't have to be a breakfast food. 

Phil: Absolutely. And you know, you talk about not having sushi for breakfast, but, you know, as I've traveled over these years, there's a lot of hotels, you know, outside the US that for breakfast have a Japanese breakfast. They have the regular American breakfast buffet with the eggs and the pastries and all the stuff. And then they've got a Japanese breakfast with sushi, with soups and so on. And I've gotta tell you probably half the time I've tended to go to that Japanese breakfast buffet instead of the American buffet that's, you know, with the Danish. 

Sally: I love it.