This Is The Least Nutritious Type Of Cap'n Crunch
While we may long have been disabused by the tagline "part of this nutritious breakfast" that accompanied cereals like Cap'n Crunch, replacing that faux healthy image with reality comes as a bit of a shock.
The original Cap'n Crunch, for example, will feed you 17 grams of added sugars, or 33 percent of the recommended daily total, per serving, according to the information available on the Cap'n Crunch website. However, a serving is only 38 grams, or a cup, while a regular box contains 398 grams, which is just over 10 servings.
The others fare about the same. The Cap'n Crunch Berries contains 16 grams of added sugar, the Peanut Butter Crunch a relatively healthy 13 grams, and the Cotton Candy Crunch just a tad more with 14 grams.
Tying first for the worst of all Cap'n Crunch cereals are the Oops! All Berries and Christmas Crunch, having 17 grams of sugar, just like the original, though their box sizes are smaller. However, in a 2011 report on sugar in children's cereals, the Environmental Working Group ranked the Oops! All Berries just above the original for percentage of sugar compared to weight, with the berries coming in at 46.9 percent and the original 44.4 percent. Obviously, nothing has changed in the decade that separates this report from the cereal's current listings.
These cereals aren't quite part of a nutritious breakfast
It seems that the part of a nutritious breakfast line worked to the extent that when photographed with a nutritious breakfast, Cap'n Crunch was certainly part of it, just not a contributing member.
Despite the appearance of cereal trending away from such sugary overloads, as exampled by The New York Times in a 2016 piece about cereal through the decades, branded cereals like Cap'n Crunch and Apple Jacks remain a health risk to the children they addict.
"Breakfast cereals are the single greatest source of added sugars in the diets of children under the age of eight," Dawn Undurraga, co-author of the 2014 iteration of the Environmental Working Group's report on cereal, told CBS. This version of the report found that 34 percent of a child's caloric intake came just from cereals' sugar. If they eat Cap'n Crunch for breakfast, it's no wonder they're running on sugar.