Responsibility - Don't Blame the Cereal

A few days ago I was flipping through the channels on Saturday morning to see if anyone had a local weather forecast instead of cartoons.  I found CBS Morning Show with 4 people sitting around the table talking about breakfast cereals.  (I think this was a filler segment when some stations break away for local news and weather, but I paused to watch.)  They showed four boxes of sweet cereal and were discussing how you have to be careful to read the labels for ingredients and nutritional information because these cereals are packed with sugar and other bad things - "like carbs" (?). 

Then they started asking each other what they ate for breakfast when they were kids.  The answers included many of these same cereals.  The only change was that the cereals used to have “sugar” in the name.  Since then the companies dropped sugar from the name, but still add lots of it.

Think about it.  Four healthy, grown people grew up eating these cereals regularly for breakfast, the ones they were warning us about just minutes earlier.  They were not overweight and their teeth did not seem to be falling out.  They had good jobs on TV.  Somehow they survived the dreaded sugary breakfasts but felt perfectly justified in warning everyone else about the dangers.  Do they think we are not as smart as they are, that we can't figure it out like they did, that they did OK, but our children are doomed?  Why do we try to blame cereals (and a host of other products, big corporations and the government) for consequences we can control through our own behavior?  This behavior is the opposite of responsibility.