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What’s your cereal style? Sweet and fun Fruit Loops? Reliable Cheerios? Superhero Wheaties?

Present in 9 out of 10 American kitchens, cereal has become the breakfast of choice for everyone from hungover college students to busy families to kids plopped in front of Saturday morning cartoons.

Grab the milk and spoon and dig in to eight tasty tidbits about breakfast cereal:

1. Religious beliefs influenced the creation of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. Seventh-Day-Adventists, in conjunction with physician John Harvey Kellogg, invented several grain-based meat substitutes in 1876. The meat substitutes evolved into the first precooked flaked cereal which was…Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.
2. After bread, cereal is the most common form of grain eaten up by Americans.
3. The first packaged breakfast cereal was invented in 1863, but didn’t catch on as the heavy bran nuggets required soaking overnight in order to be chewable.
4. Early breakfast cereals were advertised as health food and claimed to cure bowel problems.
5. John Harvey Kellogg stumbled onto the invention of wheat flakes after accidently leaving a batch of boiled wheat soaking overnight. In an attempt to save money, Kellogg decided to roll it out anyway and was surprised to see the flakes that formed.
6. Kix was the first puffed cereal, hitting the market in the 1930s.
7. In 1974, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission considered a ban on TV commercials which promoted cereal box prizes as a way to sell cereal to kids.
8. A patent for the original Corn Flakes was registered on May 31, 1894 under the name “Granose.” Hmm, Granose doesn’t sound quite as tasty.

More tasty cereal tidbits at Answers.com.

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