00:00Enjoying a delicious bowl of breakfast cereal like this can turn the roof of your mouth into a battlefield, and
00:05that's actually by design.
00:07Here's what's happening.
00:07We all know the feeling.
00:09You crush a bowl of Captain Crunch and for three days the roof of your mouth feels like a crime
00:13scene, but crush a bag of chips and nothing.
00:16It's a double whammy that these companies built on purpose.
00:19A piece of cereal like Captain Crunch is a hard, dense nugget of baked corn or oats.
00:24To fight off sogginess, they spray it with a coating of hardened sugar so it's still rock hard the moment
00:29it hits your mouth.
00:30That coating is a crystalline barrier that keeps the cereal crunchy in the milk, but it's also hard and brittle,
00:36so when it breaks, it fractures into sharp little edges.
00:40And underneath, that dense nugget is exactly why it bites back.
00:44Where a chip is thin and crispy, a dense ball of sugared cereal is classified as crunchy, breaking over and
00:50over again with each fracture scraping the same spot.
00:53But if something so delicious can also bring you pain, is it any good for you?
00:57Nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidoo calls sugary cereal the number one ultra-processed food she avoids, saying one bowl can
01:05carry almost a full day's worth of sugar.
01:08Cereal has its champions, though.
01:10Sarah Ludmer of W.K. Kellogg says it's one of the first meals a kid can make themselves, and the
01:15number one source of fiber and whole grains for kids at breakfast.
01:19And the proposed fix is almost too simple. Just let it get soggy.
01:23Dental experts say a couple minutes in the milk softening those edges will actually protect your mouth.
01:28And if it's too late and your mouth is already wrecked, dentist recommends swishing with warm salt water, and it
01:34should clear up in a few days.
01:35So, be honest with me, are you soaking your cereal or are you fighting through the pain? Or are you
01:40eating cereal at all?
01:41Let us know in the comments and follow us here for more.
01:43So don't let us know in the comments.
01:43.
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