A while back I wrote a post about the high profit-margin-to-cost of the breakfast cereal business. Today I have more to say on breakfast cereal, not about the manufacturing process or profit margins, but about the pervasive use of fruit-related words in the naming of these products.

If I had just ten seconds to share advice on improving your nutrition, I suspect you already know exactly what I would say: Eat more fruits and vegetables. And I don’t think that would surprise anyone. We all know that fruits and vegetables are nutritional powerhouses, and we also know that everyone should be eating more of them, especially since most of us don’t eat enough produce to begin with. 

The food industry also knows this. They know that we know we should be consuming more fruits and vegetables. This is precisely why so many processed items contain some version of the word “fruit” and include examples from the fruit family. To a certain extent, it’s true for vegetables, too — think vegetable oil — though not exactly the same because, after all, there isn’t the same draw to choose a box of asparagus crisps or spinach wafers for breakfast. But it’s a really big issue for fruit, because fruit is nature’s candy, and candy makes us want more.

So there are “Froot” loops, fruit roll-ups, Tootsie frootie rolls! Fruity pebbles! It’s theatre of the absurd in the breakfast cereal aisle. 

But that’s not all. You can also try apple jacks, and apple raisin crisp, apple zings, apple zingaroos, strawberry chex, apple cinnamon chex, cap’n crunch crunch berries, Boo-Berry, banana nut cheerios, berry burst cheerios, banana frosted flakes, bite-size frosted blueberry muffin, frosted mini-wheats strawberry delight, cranberry almond crunch, Fruit ’n Fibre, Fruit & nut granola cereal, honey bunches of oats with peaches, and berry-berry six. I did not make any of these up; all of these have been available for purchase at one time or another in recent years.

There are many more products with names like this, including raisin bran, total raisin bran, apple cinnamon rice krispies, berry krispies, fruity marshmallow krispies, strawberry rice krispies, strawberry shortcake, Special K Red Berries, Special K Fruit and Yogurt, and Total Cranberry Crunch. You get the picture.

It’s one thing to eat a strawberry. It’s entirely different when you eat frosted mini-wheats strawberry delight, with its fruity name. Let’s be clear. This is not a strawberry. It spikes your blood sugars, and its nutritional value is markedly limited in comparison with fresh fruit.

The Weight Watchers system assigns a status of “free” to fresh fruits and vegetables, which means that you can eat as many as you want, without costing anything from your daily point allotment. That is not the case for blueberry oat clusters.