Thank you. I really think it's important for parents to teach their kids to be healthy, especially when big corporations and big money now advertise to kids, because they know kids can guilt their parents into buying these harmful products. We had food icons when we were young, but it's worse now. Look at almost any sugary or fattening product when you go into the grocery store. Products not only have icons created for that food, they use popular cartoon characters to influence your kid into wanting that item. Kids recognize the character, love the character, and want to be like the character. That character loves Life cereal? The kid wants to eat Life cereal!

A cereal that's been around for years, or a new cereal (that's really just the same basic type of cereal that's already out there--like the kind with mini marshmallows in fun shapes), will have Scooby-Doo, Spiderman, or some other loved character. Don't get me wrong--I love Scooby-Doo and Garfield, among others! I'm just pointing out the influence they have on your kids to sell products.

You can put two boxes of the same cereal in front of your kid, one with a regular box design, and the other with Superman or Dora the Explorer on the box, and chances are, the kid will go for the cartooned box. They did an experiment like this on 20/20 or one of those shows. They put two cupcakes in front of a boy, I think one had a generic character or none at all, and the other with Spiderman. Kid chose Spiderman. A girl got to choose from two bananas: One was plain, the other had pretty stickers of fave characters. She chose the one with the stickers.

And, don't get me wrong: They put these characters on healthy food, too. Just today, I saw Scooby-Doo bottled water! Bottled water isn't really any better than filtered tap water (and that's what much of it really is), but the point is, you could get a your Scooby-Doo-loving kid to drink the water, and that would be better than soda. Still, I believe parents advertisers shouldn't be "selling" to kids. That just seems wrong to me.