General Mills has announced they'll reduce the sugar in breakfast cereals. Probably a good idea. I was listening to an old Gunsmoke radio show the other day, and the cereal ads seemed to emphasize with inordinate glee the overwhelming presence of sugar. Sample:

"Yes, it's the sugar-frosted treat that's frosted with sugar, for a sugar-frosted taste the whole family will love. Try new sugar-sweetened Frosted Puffsweets! ! Toasted atoms of corn coated with thick sugary goodness. Kids love 'em right out of the box, or rolled with Karo syrup into a thick ball they can gnaw on the way to school, or smushed into a thick paste they can smear on their skin for topical absorption. Worried about cavities, Mom? Try crushing Frosted Puffsweets into handy snort-form!"

That was the pitch, more or less. You wonder why they didn't introduce fluoridated milk just to give your teeth a fighting chance. The ads now have the campy shock of an old cigarette ad with a doctor advising you to smoke Luckies. I'm still amazed they never invented Lucky Strike Charms, which could be either smoked or diced and enjoyed with milk.

Somewhere along the line parents learned that starting the day with half a pound of refined sugar just jacked up your kid like a lemur on a hot plate, and made them crash around 10. This lead to the invention of the "Balanced Breakfast" concept, where a bowl of Sugar-Sparkled Cocoa Nodules would be photographed with toast, orange juice, a monkey wrench, a copy of Newsweek, and other items that could theoretically be part of a balanced breakfast, but would be ignored in favor of another bowl of Nature's Crack.

This would have gone on indefinitely, but now we're facing a new era, where sugary cereals are bad. If this bothers you, take heart: Chocolate Lucky Charms may not be 50 percent sugar by weight anymore, but it's still 43 percent sugar. Wow. That's right: they invented Chocolate Lucky Charms to satisfy the people who didn't think regular Lucky Charms were sweet enough.