Not a lot of difference – Cap’n Crunch has 16g sugar per 150 calories. Crunch Berries has 17g sugar per 160 calories. Both also show little difference from they used to be when expressed per calorie like this… or at least as far back as I can check. Both Cap’n Crunch and Crunch Berries were initially released in the 1960s. Perhaps the bigger change is serving size. Serving size used to be listed as 3/4 of a cup. Now it is listed as 1 cup. The other cereals I listed show a similar pattern with larger serving size than past decades.
Which is surprising as I always thought that companies shrunk serving sizes to increase the number of servings per (smaller) box and decrease the number of calories and grams of sugar per serving.
The box is indeed smaller, or at least contains less cereal. Cap’n Crunch box used to be 16 oz. Now it is 12.6oz. However, they didn’t decrease the listed serving size, so servings per box is much smaller. A box used to have 17 servings. Now it has 9.
Lucky Charms! We still get a box every year around St. Patrick’s Day.
My BFF always wanted the prize that Captain Crunch cereal used to have. Her mom bought the cereal…and I joined them for breakfast every Saturday to eat it! You couldn’t pay me to eat it now.
I do love a Trader Joe’s brown sugar and maple shredded wheat. We don’t have a Trader Joe’s near us, so it’s a treat to have it.
I honestly do not care about the sugar content…we don’t get this type of cereal very often.
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Crunch Berries have been around for a long time! Berries! Fruit!
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My brothers ate Capt Crunch (and then with crunchberries), lucky charms, and other high sugar cereals and I didn’t. I did/do like Coco Puffs and Frosted Flakes but didn’t get them often. And they ate a lot more than 1 cup - like a mixing bowl full.
For us the big treat was the little individual boxes we got about twice a year.
I’m fine with them limiting or removing dyes from foods, and breakfast cereals contain a lot of dyes.
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I don’t think I ever even tried cereal until I was in my late 30s. Between never having milk (allergy) and my parents not buying it (I don’t think it was something they culturally grew up with), it just wasn’t something I went out of my way for. I think as a kid I thought you could ONLY have it with milk, so I was probably afraid of it.
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My sister put apple juice on her cereal because she thought milk was disgusting.
I never liked sweets much… apple juice was too sweet for me even by itself, so I was disgusted by the idea of juice and cereal combined.
So if we had cereal we sat far apart at the table. 
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I can’t even stand the smell of apple juice. We seemed to have missed the sweet gene in our family. Even my kids don’t like things that are overly sweet (which to us is barely sweet to the average American).
The chart above summarizes the cereals used in the sample. The cereals that were chosen for the study were ones that are new or had been modified in some way from previous year. The vast majority of modifications were new packaging. A smaller minority were chosen because they it was a new product or range extension of existing product. Among this sample the specific changes from 2010 to 2023 were as follows:
Average sugar (g) – 10.x → 11.x
Average sodium (mg) – 150 → 200
Average fiber (g) --3.5 → 3.0
In think this paper raises more questions than it answers. A key one is how much of this relatively small average nutrition change listed above is due to changes in which cereals compose the sample vs change in general nutrition of cereals? The bulk of the sample was composed of cereals with packaging changes and presumably without nutrition changes. I expect less healthy cereals would be more likely to be the ones with packaging changes, both since the packaging changes are more likely to catch the attention of kids than adults and because kids are less likely than adults to be sensitive to things like shrinkflation.
Another key question is what is the nutrition content of the cereals kids typically eat, and has that nutrition changed over time? I expect the less unhealthy options like Cheerios are also the ones that are less likely appear in the sample.
Among the small number of popular cereals I checked, I am not aware of any that had a large decline in nutrition from previous decades. The bulk of cereals marketed to children were unhealthy decades ago, and bulk are still unhealthy today. Note that the Calvin and Hobbes frosted sugar bomb series of comics pictured above was introduced 40 years ago, in 1986.
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Smart girl! Blue milk? No thanks!
Yes, too much sugar is definitely bad, but many or most (all?) cereals contain preservatives to keep them fresh.
For example, Shredded Wheat contains BHT, unless cereals have changed recently.
Yes, I’m sure they’re safe. (Sarcasm)
Post brand shredded wheat uses BHT as a preservative, but many store brands’ shredded wheat uses vitamin E as a preservative.
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Among the 3 cereals I listed as eating in my post, none contain BHT. The ingredient list for the Shredded Wheat I buy is whole grain wheat and vitamin E (as preservative). As ucbalumnus mentions, this the norm for store brand Shredded Wheat – Vons, Kroger, Walmart, and all other store brands I am aware of. Post is the exception, not the rule.
I generally find store brands to be better value than name brand for cereals – lower price, without decline in quality. For the listed store brands, I prefer the taste to the name brand, particularly for Toasted O’s vs Cheerios, in spite of Toasted O’s not having added sugar, while Cheerios has a small amount of sugar. I prefer the larger o’s and firmer texture of Toasted O’s to Cheerios as well, which may relate to Cheerios being marketed more towards children.
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And is Vitamin E, as a preservative, or Tocopherols, safe?
That is the current consensus – An assessment of the safety of tocopherols as food additives - ScienceDirect
“On the basis of the comprehensive experimental and clinical data available on α-tocopherol, the chemical and biological similarity of the α-, β-, γ- and δ-tocopherols and the information available on the levels of tocopherols used as food antioxidants, it is concluded that tocopherols are safe food additives.”
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Are these natural or synthetic?
Honestly, the paragraph above doesn’t make me warm and fuzzy.
Do we know which tocopherols are in cereals, because not all of them appear to good for you? IMO, I’d rather stay clear of preservatives in an abundance of caution for any discoveries or new info later in life.
Cereal preservatives primarily add alpha or mixed rather than gamma, you are discussing implications of taking far larger doses than are used as preservatives in the discussed cereals, and different studies have come to different conclusions that the one you list. The amount added in cereals as a preservative (rather than amount added as vitamin for high reported RDA %) pales to the amounts that are obtained in other parts of typical US diet, such as nuts and oils.
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