Hello there and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I'm your host, Monica Reinegel.

And today I want to tell you about an exchange I recently had with a Nutrition Diva listener

because I learned so much from this. So the nominal subject of our conversation was

sweetened breakfast cereals and their effect on children's nutrition and health. But for

me, it was equally about the perils of making assumptions and we all do this myself included.

Some beliefs just seem so obvious that it doesn't occur to us to check whether the evidence

supports our beliefs. We just assume that it does. And perhaps that's what we mean when

we say something is self evident. It requires no corroboration. Furthermore, if we then

do go looking for evidence to support something that we already believe to be true, we can easily

misinterpret the evidence that we find in order to make it line up with our assumptions.

This conversation that I had was triggered by an episode I did recently on fortified foods

and the role they play in meeting our nutritional needs, ready to eat breakfast cereals are

among the most aggressively fortified foods. And in my previous episode, I cited some data

showing that fortified cereals, including the sweetened ones, play an important role in meeting

the nutritional needs of millions of children. In a nutshell, people who eat ready to eat cereal have

higher intakes of several key nutrients due in part to that fortification. And they are also

more likely to meet nutrient recommendations than non-serial eaters. And the positive impact

of cereal on overall nutrition is even more pronounced in children from lower income households.

In response to that episode, I got an incredulous email from a listener. He couldn't believe

that I had failed to mention all the research that's been done on the long-term consequences

of feeding kids sweetened breakfast cereals, specifically obesity and type 2 diabetes.

I asked him to please share with me the research that he'd seen connecting the consumption of sweetened

...