The Top 5 Sugary Cereals Of All Time

One of my favorite things to do during the weekend at college was stumble down to the dining hall after a night of partying and fill a cereal bowl with about 8 different kinds of cereal.

By Jess

Through blurry vision and a pounding head, I would reach for one “good-for-you” brand (for the base), and then proceed to find every sweet option available, filling my bowl to the brim with enough chemically altered sugar to keep me hopping for hours.

You see, when I was younger, my mom never let us have sweet cereal. We’d go with her to the grocery store, beg and plead for something with a cartoon character on it, and she’d simply shake her head, reach for the raisin bran, and state, “filling your mouth with sugar first thing in the morning means the dentist is going to have to pull your teeth.”

She could scare us for a little while, but once I grew up and realized eating sugary cereal doesn’t really dictate how many cavities you get drilled (I was the healthiest kid alive and still had about 3 of them), I vowed to find my way back the bobble-headed cartoons of my youth and their bounty of sweet.

So now, for your consideration, I present the Top 5 Sugary Cereals Of All Time (or at least my childhood):

Reeses’s Puffs: Even though it tasted nothing like the candy, this cereal was still the shit. Chocolate and peanut butter? With milk?! ALL IN ONE BOWL??! Who cared that the balls were hard and scratched up the top part of your mouth? Who cared that they got stale in a day? You were basically eating candy!!! For breakfast!!!

Fruit Loops: If you were smart enough to convince your parents that eating this cereal was actually good for you (“see Mom, FRUIT loops”), you soon found out how few spoonfuls it took to make your teeth chatter from sugar shock. Plus, watching your milk turn rainbow colors was like an LSD trip before you knew what LSD was.

Golden Grahams: Out of all the cereals, this one tasted more like it’s actual name than any of them. I often preferred to eat this cereal dry, finding milk just diluted the finely crafted sugar to cracker ratio.

Cookie Crisp: As a young child, the idea of eating cookies for breakfast blew my mind. Who was allowed to do such a thing? What Mom was so liberal that she let her kids dunk cookies in milk and call it a meal? One time in third grade, I actually met such a mom—she smoked a lot and asked us if we’d ever tasted whiskey before—but she always had a box of Cookie Crisp on top of her refrigerator that could be eaten at any time. Man, when she wasn’t screaming her neighbors or telling us about government conspiracies, she was totally cool.

Lucky Charms: At 24, I’m still this cereal’s bitch. I go back to it time and time again, even though I know there’s enough sugar inside those fake marshmallows to give me the shakes. What they should really do is just take out all the oat pieces (because I mean, seriously…no one eats those), and market this stuff as a synthetic sugar steroid.

Have I missed any of your favorites? What childhood cereals put you into a sugar coma?