What’s in Those Breakfast Cereals

Parents wondering whether their kids are better off breakfasting on a cereal such as Shredded Wheat ‘n Bran or one called Ice Cream Cones Chocolate Chip (these would be the same parents, presumably, who wonder whether their toddlers should watch “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” or “Nightmare on Elm Street”) will find ample help in Consumer Reports.

The October issue rates 79 ready-to-eat and 22 hot cereals on fiber, protein, sugar, fat, micronutrients (vitamins, minerals), calories, sodium and cost per ounce.

As usual, the Consumer Reports rating system of tiny red, black and white circles makes quantifying difficult.

But the listings seem to verify common sense--especially if you doubt that as much as 4 1/2 teaspoons of sugar per ounce of cereal is healthy.

So, according to Consumer Reports, Cocoa Puffs aren’t as nutritious as Fiber One; Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries aren’t as nutritious as Wheatena; Fruity Pebbles aren’t as nutritious as Wholesome ‘n Hearty Nut Bran; and Dinersaurs aren’t as nutritious as Nutri-Grain Nuggets.

The primer includes pieces on how to read a cereal box (for example, the federal government allows a 20% margin of error in calorie counts) and how to economize on cereal. It carries a detailed though inconclusive discussion of the oat-bran-as-choloresterol-fighter controversy.

Out With Greek

Hippocrates, the acclaimed health magazine that won a record-setting two National Magazine Awards in its first two years, will change its name with its January-February issue.

The San Francisco-based publication, half-owned by Time-Life, will be retitled “In Health.” A spin-off, controlled circulation publication for physicians will carry the old title Hippocrates and will be Time-Life’s first trade publication.

Miners’ Strike

“Miners May Go to Jail, But Scabs Will Go to Hell.”

That’s the sort of sign folks have been planting on well-tended lawns in parts of southwestern Virginia since 1,900 miners went on strike against the Pittston coal company last April.

With recent developments at the mine, the media are swarming. But the cover story in the September Zeta Magazine, a monthly published by the Institute for Social and Cultural Communications in Boston, will make readers wonder why more magazines didn’t move in sooner to do features on the strike.

Zeta, which bills itself as “an independent political magazine of critical thinking on political, cultural, social, and economic life in the United States,” is among the most interesting of the new leftist-activist publications. The articles range the “progressive” spectrum, and a healthy letters column encourages ongoing battles between impassioned factions of the multitude of causes represented.

The essay by Laura McClure, with photos by Donna Binder, takes readers into the hill country where United Mine Workers of America members are squared off against the coal company.

The battle lines are sharply drawn. The miners and their families, with a generations-old tradition of settling strikes with bloodshed, use tenuously nonviolent means to protest the mine owner’s policies. Decked out in camouflage “solidarity” uniforms emblazoned with slogans such as “God, Guns, and Guts built the UMWA,” the strikers quietly loathe the state troopers and guards--hired in part through ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine (“later day Pinkertons,” the author writes)--who protect the non-union miners running the union gantlet.

The story is reminiscent of novelist Emile Zola’s graphic descriptions of coal strikes in 19th-Century France. Not much, apparently, has changed.