Wendyl wants to know: Any flavour you like as long as it's lemon

Fruity Rings have no artificial flavours but do contain artificial colours. Photo / Supplied

This caught my eye in the very colourful and heavily stocked cereal aisle in my local supermarket. I was looking for something a bit different, yet healthy for my visiting grandchildren to have for breakfast.

This colourful pack would probably make them very happy, but not on my watch. And then I spotted the three words "no artificial flavours" and I had to wonder why a food producer would remove artificial flavours yet leave artificial colours in?

Homebrand Fruity Rings. $3 for 300g

Flours (rice, barley, wholemeal wheat, maize)
So these aren't wholegrains. They are grains ground up into flour, so there's not a lot of fibre going on here which is one of the reasons for eating cereal. So basically these are extruded flour paste.

Sugar
You will get 9.8g of sugar which is just over two teaspoons per 30g of this cereal but once you add milk that goes up to 17.4g, just over four teaspoons.

Salt
Not too much salt in here at 70mg per 30g serve.

Colours (122, 110, 100, 133)
These are carmoisine (122) and sunset yellow (110) which have both been voluntarily phased out by food producers in the UK. Any food producers who continue to use these artificial colours in the UK must now put a compulsory warning on their labels which says "may have effects on activity and attention in children".

Brilliant blue (133) can cause allergic reactions in asthmatics and has been banned in many countries.

Curcumin (100) is a natural orange-yellow colour - good to see one natural colour here.

Emulsifier (471)
This is mono and diglycerides of fatty acids which is a common emulsifier in processed foods.

Natural lemon citrus flavour
There is only one flavour because they all taste the same. Purple, red, orange and green all have a rather pleasant lemony natural flavour.

My recommendations
I think it is about time we taught our kids that breakfast does not come in fun colours. In fact any real food, unless it's a fruit or vegetable, does not sit in your bowl glowing like plastic buttons.

And you can't tell me that in that vast array of breakfast cereals in the supermarket aisle you can't find something a little more natural.

As a guide, look at the nutrition information in the per 100g label and go for something which has less than 15g sugar, less than 400mg sodium and 5g to 15g fibre. This product has 32.8g of sugar, 235mg of sodium and no fibre listed.

And of course, look for no artificial flavours, colours or preservatives.

I commend Homebrand for taking out the artificial flavours but perhaps we would be willing to pay a little bit more than $3 a bag if they used natural colourings too.