On the topic of food, my wife and I have a dirty little secret: Every now and then we give our young children a couple of Fruit Loops (the cereal) as a treat. Normally we limit this to home -- with the curtains drawn and the family committed to a vow of silence -- but recently my wife made the social faux-pas of actually packing some for an outing.

It wasn't surprizing to me when the "I am the expert of parenting everyone else's kids" looks started coming our way: The weak of this planet prop up their existence by spending their waking hours judging everyone else, and there are few things that can be openly critiqued with muttered comments and conveyed expressions as children (I especially enjoy going to loud, boistrous family restaurants, where glasses are clinking and conversations are loud, and having angry-at-life individuals casting glares if my children dare to open their mouths, as if they're having a fine dinner at an exclusive restaurant, and their foie gras, though strangely they cower under my return gesture. I have well-behaved, polite children, yet I've seen this sort of look far too many times to tolerate it anymore).

The reason that I'm open to occasional Fruit Loops, and I refuse to buy into the notion that they're some sort of brain-addling toxin, is because I base my perception of reality upon facts rather than conventional beliefs. In the case of Fruit Loops, an entire cup of the stuff, dry, contains only around 12g of sugar. Sounds daunting, until you realize that a cup of fruit juice contains from 20 - 45g of sugar (not to mention having negligible nutritional content apart from the Vitamic C that they stuff into every "fruit" product). A little 100ml container of yogurt (the kind that people actually eat) has about 7g of sugar.

This is only the start of the sugars that are in virtually every product, which is why we started quantifying products by "how many bowls of fruit loops" (e.g. "Wow! One bar of this is 4 bowls of fruit loops!").

So a couple of fruit loops really isn't that evil in the grand scheme of things. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself.